With over 1,000 visits to its facilities in recent months, the center serves business clients from the main sectors of the Spanish economy, making it a global benchmark in design, implementation and operation, guaranteeing the highest levels of availability, flexibility, reliability, safety and efficiency.
Inside this data center, a new demonstration space specializing in cloud services has been incorporated: the Innovation Center Alcalá, where companies, institutions and partners can see the main technological solutions that Telefónica offers its users to improve their business processes.
The center, located in the Madrid town of Alcalá de Henares, is the key piece in Telefónica's Data Center consolidation strategy, and is one of the company's four strategic state-of-the-art data centers globally, which will coexist with a small number of satellite data centers that will support local services.
All of Telefónica's data centers will be interconnected through a single Corporate Global Network under unified supervision and operation. This will allow Telefónica to optimize infrastructure utilization, improve virtualization levels, retire obsolete equipment, and standardize its infrastructure operating model, in line with the company's global objectives.
At the Alcalá Data Center, services from the United Kingdom, Spain, and Germany are being consolidated, in addition to global processes, advancing in the level of quality, simplification, and standardization, key to the transformation of the Telefónica Group.
In this context, the company has strengthened its Cloud service model, with this technology being the main pillar of the architecture of the rest of the solutions that Telefónica makes available to companies (workplace, unified communications, data connectivity, M2M, security…).
The company has developed its cloud technology offering for businesses to the point of realizing the concept of Hybrid Cloud or Enterprise Cloud, through the Virtual Data Center 2.0 service. This solution allows companies to combine their private cloud with Telefónica's public cloud, meeting the specific needs of a corporate environment, ensuring the operation of critical applications, and enabling the flexible development of the company's cloud infrastructure.
In addition to the aforementioned TIER IV Gold, in this first year, the Alcalá Data Center has received several awards and certifications that endorse compliance with the requirements of excellence of the most demanding international regulations in its category.
TIER IV GOLD:
This certification, recently awarded by the Uptime Institute, recognizes not only the design and implementation of the data center according to the highest redundancy standards, but also its automated management and operation after a minimum of six months of activity, with guaranteed recovery in case of incidents. This certification also assesses other factors such as preventive, corrective, and predictive maintenance strategies, as well as emergency response procedures. The Gold category is the highest awarded by this organization.
LEEDS GOLD:
The Leeds Gold Certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), awarded by the US Green Building Council in the New Construction category, endorses the energy efficiency of the Alcalá Data Center, a criterion present from the very beginning of this project.
BRILL AWARDS FOR EFFICIENT IT:
The Alcalá Data Center has been awarded this prize in the Global Leadership Awards category. The Uptime Institute recognizes with these awards those projects worldwide that have achieved the greatest efficiency in data center and IT operations at all stages of the project, from design and construction to commissioning and operation.
In this way, it grants three Global Leadership Awards to companies whose projects have demonstrated a global vision in their commitment to efficiency in the IT world. Telefónica was recognized with one of these awards in 2014 for its development of a Corporate Standard for the design and construction of new Data Centers, based on a modular and flexible approach.
Another key new feature this year is the Alcalá Innovation Center, one of Spain's most innovative ICT demonstration spaces. It's an interactive showcase of Telefónica's main services for businesses and institutions. Located inside the Alcalá Data Center, the center specializes in cloud computing solutions. Different environments are recreated here, featuring the latest technology, so visitors can experience firsthand the advantages of the cloud and Telefónica's business services.
