ONE of the biggest telecommunication companies in Slovakia that provides both fixed-line and mobile services, Slovak Telekom (ST), is not limiting its business to telephony. On June 1, it officially began operations at its new data centre in Bratislava, which involved an investment exceeding €15 million.
“Slovak Telekom is not a beginner in the ICT sector – we have long experience with operation of several data centres in Slovakia,” Ruediger Schulz, chief operating officer, Network and IT, for Slovak Telekom, in which Deutsche Telekom holds a 51-percent share, told The Slovak Spectator. “We expect from Telekom DataCenter a strengthening of our position in the market for business solutions.”
Schulz explained that firms that build and administer their own data centres and secure the required continuous availability of data take on a demanding job in terms of time and finances, and because of the never-ending expansion of IT systems such data centres often reach their capacity, security and quality limits within a few years. He added that the low effectiveness of such investments, under current pressure to reduce IT costs, is no longer acceptable to many firms and, coupled with trends in cloud computing and green IT, has led to a significant increase in demand for outsourced data centres.
The centre consists of three IT halls covering a total area of 1,200 square metres. ST classifies it as a Tier III, based on the Uptime Institute’s scale, which means in practice that it has 99.982-percent of technologies available and that some components even meet the standards for Tier IV.
