Originally posted to Data Center Frontier by Rich Miller
With its $26 billion deal to acquire LinkedIn, Microsoft stands to become an even larger player in the market for wholesale data center space. LinkedIn has rapidly expanded its Internet infrastructure in recent years, leasing more than 30 megawatts of capacity from wholesale data center service providers.
LinkedIn has more than 430 million users, and has been scaling its IT infrastructure to keep pace with its rapid growth. After launching in 2008 with 20 servers, LinkedIn housed its servers in retail colocation facilities. In 2013 it began shifting to a wholesale strategy, teaming with Digital Realty on a new data center in Ashburn, Virginia.
“Our data center strategy is to partner with colocation providers to build wholesale data centers,” LinkedIn’s Michael Yamaguchi wrote in a recent blog post. In the wholesale model, customers lease entire data halls rather than renting capacity by the cage or cabinet, as seen in “retail” colocation.
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