OREANDA-NEWS. March 15, 2016. Expansion has been hot news at Equinix lately, with the high-profile acquisitions of Bit-isle and Telecity followed quickly by announcements about more growth coming in 2016.

The billions invested and massive capacity added obviously make expansion a big story for us, but it’s also a familiar story. Since Equinix opened, we’ve been committed to careful, proactive growth, so it’s no surprise that as our customers’ need for direct, secure, instant interconnection has grown in recent years, so have we. Our sixth and newest data center in Dallas, DA7, which is now open for business, is a great example of how we’re responding to market demand and moving to meet customer needs.

It wasn’t even two years ago that we last opened a data center in Dallas. The DA6 facility came online amid surging demand for data center space in Dallas, the eighth largest metro area in the U.S. and an important data traffic hub between the east and west coasts. That demand has not slowed. Combined with the requirement for companies to instantly and securely collaborate across regions to do business in this interconnected era, it was clear our Dallas customers needed a place like DA7.

The emergence of the Internet of Things and big data analytics is promising a coming data tidal wave/tsunami/avalanche (pick your natural disaster). Businesses need a place where there’s room to store and access the reams of data that will be available – so they can protect it, analyze it and gain timely insight from it.

DA7 is that place. The facility adds nearly 38,000 square feet of colocation space to the Dallas metro, along with room for an additional 1,100 cabinets.

DA7 is connected to the other five Dallas data centers, which host a combined 120 network service providers, 275 companies, and a host of active industry ecosystems, including enterprise, network services, cloud and IT, and content and digital media. There’s quick access to external data sources, private data processing clusters like Hadoop (for analytics) and private enterprise storage from public cloud applications. And it’s important to note that the interconnection within the Dallas metro stretches beyond Texas state lines via Equinix’s global interconnection platform, which includes 146 data centers in 40 markets. That gives DA7 customers agility to move close to end users and partners worldwide, for high-performance, low-latency connectivity and collaboration.

DA7 also adds capacity for multi-site IT deployments, which creates data redundancy across the metro and enables tiered backup and disaster recovery strategies.

In addition, DA7 can be a place to execute an integrated cloud storage strategy. Companies can store performance and capacity tiers adjacent to the network, then quickly access those tiers from the public cloud when they need more computing power.

We’re excited about what the addition of DA7 can do for our customers. Our history in Dallas is long, stretching back to Equinix’s first years, and with DA7 we’re looking forward to making more of it.