Verizon-owned Terremark opens Amsterdam data center, second in a month

Verizon-owned Terremark opened two data centers in September, each a world away from the other.

The latest center, the Network Access Point (NAP) of Amsterdam, is a 25,000-square-foot facility opened this week near the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Area, the Netherlands’ main international airport. Terremark also maintain data centers in Spain, the United Kingdom and Turkey.

It’s to be the company’s flagship facility in the region and its 11th, according to a press release, and “was strategically built to access one of the world’s largest Internet hubs in terms of traffic and members.”

In early September Terremark announced it had taken over a 185,000-square-foot data center in São Paulo, Brazil as the company looks to become an even bigger player in Latin American IT. Terremark’s NAP of the Americas in downtown Miami is already known to house technology infrastructure for Latin American governments and large corporations.

Verizon purchased Miami-based Terremark in early 2011 for about $1.4 billion in a move seen as a stepping stone into cloud computing and managed IT services, which have both been gaining traction in recent years.

In late August Verizon purchased Burlington, Mass.-based CloudSwitch, a startup that raised about $15 million in 2008. CloudSwitch’s technology is similar to a technology used by Internet retail giant Amazon.com that delivers computing technology on a bit-by-bit basis, rather than forcing a customer to rent an entire server, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.