DataBank has wrapped up its deal to buy Zayo Holding Group's zColo data centers in the U.S. and U.K.
In September, DataBank announced it was buying 44 zColo data centers in Europe and the U.S., from Zayo Holdings for an undisclosed sum. A second closing of five data centers in France is slated for the first quarter of next year.
RELATED: DataBank to buy zColo data centers from Zayo
With the U.S. and U.K. data centers in the hand, DataBank now offers colocation, cloud, connectivity, and managed services in 60 data centers across 28 key markets in those countries.
RELATED: DataBank invests $30M in EdgePresence to reach 'far edge' of networks
The closing of the deal with Zayo came on the heels of DataBank's $30 million investment in EdgePresence in October. Statesboro, Georgia-based EdgePresence is the owner and operator of multi-tenant, modular data centers that provide space, power, bandwidth, and interconnection across U.S. markets.
Located at the base of cell towers, enterprise campus locations and key real estate locations, EdgePresence's modular data centers have a compact footprint that includes monitoring, physical security and cooling features. By using EdgePresence's Edge Data Centers (EDCs,) DataBank is able to colocate its customer workloads at the "far edge" of a network to further reduce latency while improving performance.
By investing in EdgePresence and buying the zColo data centers, DataBank is positioning itself to take advantage of services and applications, such as 5G, virtual reality, augmented reality, and IoT, that are located at the edge to enable low latency. Service providers, enterprises and hyperscaler cloud providers are targeting edge compute locations in conjunction with the broader roll-out of 5G services.
While the initial targets for edge compute and 5G-enabled services are large, dense metro areas, companies such as DataBank are moving those workloads and platforms closer to second, third, and fourth-tier markets.
DataBank now has more than 1 million-square feet of collocation space, 13 cloud nodes and 20 network interconnect hubs. It has 65 data centers in 29 markets and more than 30,000 network cross connects
“DataBank has now assembled a unique portfolio of data center infrastructure and network interconnect options to address customer workloads anywhere from Tier 1 markets to the far edge,” said DataBank CEO Raul K. Martynek, in a statement. “With an open interconnect architecture and virtually unlimited geographic options, we are poised to help our customers in the U.S. migrate their workloads and adapt to the next evolution of the internet: the hyper-localization of data and compute being unleashed by 5G networks.”
While the data center and colocation markets are led by giants such as Equinix and Digital Realty, DataBank has targeted secondary "NFL" cities. DataBank has data centers in Kansas City, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Indianapolis, and Salt Lake City, among others.
DataBank was acquired by Digital Bridge four years ago. Digital Bridge is a communications infrastructure company that has a range of companies under its belt that cover cell towers, small cells, data centers and fiber. Digital Bridge investment firm Digital Colony and EQT acquired Zayo Technologies last year for $8.2 billion.