Atlantic.Net Opens First West Coast Data Center, And Donates Its First Month's Revenue

The high-tech environs of shiny new data centers seem world's away from the streets on which thousands of homeless men and women sleep every night, even in the San Francisco Bay Area where, at least geographically, they often are not at all far apart.

That's why cloud services provider Atlantic.Net, in the spirit of the holidays, will donate the first month of revenue from a data center it is launching in the Bay Area to San Francisco-based charity Project Homeless Connect, a nonprofit that conducts outreach events for the city's homeless population, the company said Tuesday.

The new facility is Atlantic.Net's "first foray into the West Coast," said CEO Marty Puranik, and the company wanted to start its relationship with its new community by helping its least fortunate residents.

[Related: VPS Hosting, Cloud Provider Atlantic.Net Builds Data Centers in Toronto, Dallas]

"When you think about technology on the West Coast, there's kind of a divide between if you're in tech and if you're not. For our industry, there's maybe a tone deafness, so what we're saying is we're trying to be part of the solution," Puranik told CRN.

Atlantic.Net currently operates data centers near its headquarters in Orlando, Fla., as well as in Dallas and Toronto.

The company was founded in the mid-1990s as a VAR and system integrator, then transitioned into a dial-up ISP before again morphing into a co-location services provider. Atlantic.net first virtualized its servers in 2010 to begin offering customers cloud services.

The Silicon Valley facility was born from customer demand, Puranik told CRN.

"We had a lot of inquiries and a lot of requests for something on the West Coast. When we looked at it closely it was a lot of developers primarily located in Northern California. So we tried to pick something close to them," Puranik said.

Those customers were "putting a lot of stuff into our central facility in Dallas," he said.

The new facility also will offer dedicated and virtual machines, Puranik said, although interest is growing much faster in the virtual option.

Atlantic.Net wrote its own orchestration software to virtualize servers atop Linux and the KVM hypervisor, and the system supports Linux and Windows virtual machines. Infrastructure in the new data center has been designed to handle hybrid cloud deployments, he said.

"It's the holidays and it's going to be exciting. We're making some positive energy. It's a big expansion since we're moving to the West Coast for the first time in our history," Puranik told CRN.

PUBLISHED DEC. 16, 2014