PT Portugal (also known as Portugal Telecoms) is a national telecommunications, media, data and business solutions provider. It owns the largest data centre network in Portugal and in 2013, began to increase the amount of data centre space available by 60% with the building of a next generation giant data centre.
Data centre services provided by PT Portugal include hosting, housing and storage, private servers, disaster recovery/business continuity and managed services.
PT Portugals services are based around the cloud. The new data centre was driven by industry predictions that demand for cloud-hosting is set to soar between now and 2020. Cloud services cover video surveillance, remote backup and the virtual data centre service. For SMEs, PT Portugals data centres offer a viable alternative to the traditional server room and associated costs and security concerns.
Location
PT Portugal is headquartered in Lisbon. It has seven data centres in its network spread throughout Portugal in Lisbon, Porto, Azores and Madeira.
The new flagship data centre is based in Covilhã, just on the edge of Portugals National Park. Opened in 2013, it is the biggest data centre in Europe and will be the sixth largest data centre in the world on completion. Phase one is complete and another three large buildings are planned to follow. Covilhã offers N+1 redundancy and is tier-III certified by the uptime institute, with some spaces that are tier-IV.
All PT Portugal data centres are secured with a card access control system, CCTV, automatic fire detection and on-site support team. Covilhã also boasts palm vein authentication technology.
Energy
The Covilhã data centre is 100% powered from sustainable energy sources, including feeds in from offsite wind and solar farms, an on-site photovoltaic solar generator and free-air cooling technology. The site is also built surrounded by a moat which offers security and aesthetic appeal whilst also serving the very practical functions of keeping the site cool and collecting rain water to support the chillers when they are required. Covilhã has a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.25 and PT Portugals entire data centre network has a PUE average of 1.11. In 2015 PT Portugal was shortlisted for the Data Centre Sustainability Award.
Funding/business model
PT Portugal is the largest telecoms provider in Portugal. It was purchased from Brazilian telecoms giant OI in 2015 by Altice Group a Luxembourg-based telecommunications multinational for more than $8 billion. Altice is expanding rapidly in the global communications, cable and data centre market. In April 2015 it took a 70%, $8.2 billion share in a major US cable firm and bought Frances SFR for $17 billion in 2014.
Customers and partners
PT Portugal data centres play host to a large range of Portuguese and European companies. By the time Covilhã opened in September 2013, it had already signed up 37 eager businesses. Amongst current clients are a number of big names in Portugals banking sector including Banco Português de Investimento and Banco Comercial Português. French firms La Redoute and Auchan, Germanys wind turbine manufacturer Repower, and Portuguese media giant Impresa are also resident in the new facilities.
In developing Covilhã, PT Portugal first took inspiration from, and then partnered with, Japanese technology firm Fujitsu. PT and Fujitsu now work together to deliver the first customer cloud platform. PT also works in partnership with Portuguese nearshoring firm Altran to bring international clients into its data centres.
Flexible, welcoming and ideal for companies looking to cloud
PT Portugals data centre network is aimed at smaller businesses as well as blue chips and international corporations. Flexible SLAs, rack space and extensive room space mean that PTs data centre offering is geared towards supporting the needs of any size of business.
PT Portugals focus is on cloud-based infrastructure solutions and is particularly attractive to companies looking to move some operations into the cloud, as well as those offering cloud-based applications and services requiring reliable server space.
PT Portugal offers tailored services to SMEs, all of which can be purchased as separate modules or as custom packages. Services can be purchased from low monthly rates and can be expanded or reduced in line with business needs, which is ideal for businesses seeking flexible, great value cloud and data centre services.