Hosting company The Planet is moving into the UK and European collocation markets through a deal with Telecity for an undisclosed amount of floor space at its Powergate data center in Acton, West London.
The Planet said it would begin operating at the London facility with leasing available from next month.
The 5,000 square metre center has up to 20kW of power per rack (4 kilowatts (kW) of customer power per rack on average), and 10 megawatts (MW) of customer capacity backed by N+1 redundancy on generators, transformers and UPS.
"For the past 18 months, we've evaluated international markets that are of strategic importance to our planned global expansion, and Europe has been at the forefront of those discussions," said The Planet's chairman and chief executive officer Douglas J. Erwin. "We've had serious customer interest, which underscored that the time was right to move forward."
The site has access to a 10GB private fiber interconnect to The Planet's core network through its Ashburn, Va., data center, as well as local connectivity to Tier-1 providers and the major European peering exchanges.
Procedures in the new facility comply with ISO 9001:2000, which benchmarks quality processes for data center operations and management.
"We've made substantial investments in our data centers and our network over the past two years, including the recent addition of new peering points on the East and West Coasts of the United States. Our storage cloud and CDN products also provide global access points. With 42 percent of our customers located in international markets, we expect considerable interest in this new operation," said Erwin.
Adriaan Oosthoek, Managing Director for TelecityGroup UK and Ireland, said: "TelecityGroup will play a crucial role in supporting The Planet's roll out into Europe, by hosting and maintaining their infrastructure in our new highly resilient and secure Powergate data center."

The Planet's Houston HQ
In December 2008, The Planet announced plans for its seventh data center, an 86,000 square foot colocation facility in Dallas. The first phase will open in May 2009.