More and more data center providers need to be able to deliver a wide geographic spread and technologically advanced services to win business from the new generation of data center customers.

Unlike a traditional enterprise that may take down a 3MW suite in a rural location, these companies value the ability to place small pieces of infrastructure in as many locations as possible. Even more valuable is the ability to have presence in a market without having to place any equipment there at all.

A recent case in point is the data center services deal by AllDigital, a provider of digital content streaming services, with data center provider Latisys. AllDigital recently expanded its colocation contract with Latisys, adding a site in Irvine, California, to a previously existing location in Denver, Colorado.

AllDigital's core service is delivering customers' content, be it video, audio, images or data, to their end users' devices. Its customers are generally broadcasters that need to stream content to a variety of device types.

One customer, for example, specializes in broadcasting live religious services from a number of churches on Sundays. Another one is a broadcaster of chess tournaments. Rogers Communications, one of the two largest telecommunications and media companies in Canada, is also a customer.

Steve Smith, AllDigital's VP of network services, said the company's offering was built to run in the cloud. “Our service is intrinsically designed to operate in a cloud environment,” he said.

Demand for its customers' content spikes in different regions at different times and it uses virtual cloud infrastructure to address these spikes.

The cloud capability came with the recent Latisys deal. In addition to Irvine and Denver, the provider has data centers in Chicago and Ashburn, Virginia, and offers Infrastructure-as-a-Service across all four, which means AllDigital can spin up cloud servers on demand in any of the four regions.

Latisys is not the only vendor AllDigital uses to provide its services. Some elements of its platform run in the Amazon Web Services cloud, and it uses content delivery networks, such as Akamai, to deliver its clients' content.

AllDigital's physical data center footprint is relatively small – about 1,000 sq ft of colocation space in Irvine and Denver each – Smith said. The company uses Dell servers and HP storage.