Businesses nationwide now rely heavily on digital services to sustain their operations amidst restrictions brought about by compliance to health protocols and adherence to lockdown policies. This abrupt shift to digital means that their mission critical applications and services must be easily accessed by customers 24/7, which necessitate safekeeping in a secure, robust and reliable data center facility.
As the largest telco-neutral data center in the Philippines, ePLDT’s VITRO Data Center has been supporting businesses as they go through their respective transformation journey.
“VITRO is the pioneer and market leader in the Philippine data center market and for the past 20 years, we have earned the trust and confidence of enterprise customers both here and abroad as we enable mission critical applications,” said Jovy Hernandez, president & CEO of ePLDT and SVP & Head for PLDT and Smart Enterprise Business Groups.
ePLDT pioneered its first purpose-built data center with the establishment of VITRO Pasig in 2000. Since then, the information and communication technologies arm of PLDT Enterprise expanded to 10 fully operational data centers with over 9000 racks that can be found across the archipelago.
VITRO offers server colocation for clients to locate their critical resources and disaster recovery seats that employees can access when needed. Such facilities and infrastructures hold several certifications that ensure VITRO’s capability of housing the needs of businesses. Three of the 10 VITRO facilities acquired TIA-942 Rated 3, certifying that the data center operates on two identical yet separate source of cooling, electricity, and connectivity.
Other compliances from VITRO are the PCI-DSS certification and its different ISO certifications for Business Continuity, IT, Information Security, Environmental and Quality Management Systems.
“From previous on-premise deployments, enterprises now realized the need for immediate access to critical workloads regardless of mobility restrictions. VITRO provides a robust infrastructure with 99.99% SLA, seismic zone 4 compliance, and with telco connectivity options for both local and international,” he said.
Among ePLDT’s data center facilities, the VITRO Makati 2 is its most prestigious and flagship data center. With its 3,600-rack capacity and a total data center floor area of 18,632 sqm, the facility assists businesses to rapidly improve their IT infrastructure, allowing them to accelerate their speed to market schedules and significantly improve service and operation uptime.
ePLDT also assures that organizations outside Metro Manila have data centers to rely on with its VITRO Clark and VITRO Subic, which in total contain more than 1,500 racks.
The company provides data center colocation services in Visayas and Mindanao as well. The VITRO Cebu 2 is its largest data center facility outside Luzon, with its 794 racks and 5,855-sqm data center space. The company also built Davao City’s first data center, which has a 44-rack capacity attending to certain business needs of local and foreign customers in the region.
According to Mr. Hernandez, VITRO’s infrastructures are ready for the always-on customers and the unpredictable workload demands. “Most commonly known as 2N redundancy system, a prerequisite for being Rated 3, the facility can perform maintenance and repairs without causing disruptions to client’s critical resources,” Mr. Hernandez explained.
In addition, ePLDT’s technical experts for data center, cloud, cybersecurity, and managed IT are always within reach to aid companies in digital transformation. The company built the biggest Security Operations Center (SOC) in the Philippines to protect critical apps of the PLDT group. SOC is also manned 24/7 to address the threats and unusual IT behavior at a rapid pace.
PLDT is likewise committed to further expand these data center facilities to serve more enterprises moving forward.
“Additional data centers will not only improve the strategic locations of the existing data center network but also increase the rack capacity to attract not only local enterprises but also global technology companies requiring a presence in the Philippines,” Mr. Hernandez said.