Iron Mountain has been around since 1951 and is perhaps best known for the document management and storage services it provides to corporate customers and government agencies. But the company is more than a highly trusted guardian of the world’s most important assets. In recent years, Iron Mountain branched out into the data center business. Today, the company is a global leader in data center and colocation services, serving 95% of the Fortune 1000 on 3 continents in 18 locations.

The data center industry has seen rapid growth in recent years, with the number of data centers worldwide skyrocketing to meet rising demand for video, data, and cloud-based content and services. Data centers need to be interconnected to ensure the efficient, timely delivery of data to billions of users each second of the day, and that’s where a technology called data center interconnect (DCI)—which allows two or more data centers to be connected—comes in.

Recognizing the need for enterprises and cloud operators to scale their footprint and establish connectivity between data centers, Iron Mountain Data Centers launched Metro Wave, a suite of network services that interconnect a primary data center to other data centers, creating an ecosystem in which customers can thrive and transact business. The services provide optical capacities up to 100G with ultra-low latency.

“Ciena worked hand-in-hand with us on Metro Wave,” said Frank Scalzo, GM, Network Strategy and Services at Iron Mountain. “Now, we can go beyond the usual ‘space and power’ and extend our customers’ reach to their customers and partners, as well as cloud providers, carriers, and peering exchanges.”

“It’s given us a tremendous competitive edge,” Scalzo added.

Ciena solutions supporting Iron Mountain

For Metro Wave, Iron Mountain chose a DCI solution from Ciena to deliver the on-demand content and cloud-based services its customers require. Ciena’s Waveserver Ai, 6500, and Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) make it possible for Iron Mountain to scale and respond on demand to changing customer network connectivity needs.

Learn more about Iron Mountain’s data center services here and listen to the podcast entitled “Debunking 5 big myths about data centers…plus, what’s DCI anyway?”