Claranet VDC honoured at 5th annual Datacentre Awards

Claranet's Virtual Data Centre (VDC), the first truly integrated Infrastructure as a Service offering available to the European market, won the European Award for Cloud Infrastructure at the 5th annual Datacentre Awards last night.

The service, which enables users to self-provision their own virtual data centre at the click-of-a-mouse, was launched in late 2011, when it received an extremely warm and enthusiastic response from customers, analysts and journalists.

Presenting the Award, organisers praised the service's integrated networking component as a key differentiator in the European cloud market.

Claranet's Virtual Data Centre is built on best-of-breed technologies and provides a single, easy-to-use portal where users can provision and manage their cloud compute, storage and networking resources. Unlike the vast majority of cloud services, VDC is integrated with Claranet's own MPLS network, ensuring greater accountability, reliability and ease of management.

Claranet's UK Managing Director, Michel Robert, said, "Although Claranet has a long pedigree in hosting and networking, we did not want to jump on the Cloud bandwagon without ensuring that we could bring a genuinely useful service to market. To ensure we did that, late last year we conducted extensive research among end users about their key concerns about cloud computing; and the Virtual Data Centre service was designed to reflect this feedback.

"In a competitive market, we needed a truly innovative service that offered real differentiation from other players," continued Robert. "By listening to our potential customers' concerns, we decided to build a service that featured integrated networking, exclusively in-country data centres and a hypervisor-agnostic platform - addressing the three key concerns amongst users, of reliability, data sovereignty and ease of migration.

"This Award for Claranet's Virtual Data Centre, the first pan-European competition for which we've entered the service, is testament to the solid groundwork that we did, and the skill and expertise of our product and technical teams. The Datacentre Awards are judged by a panel of our peers in the datacentre industry, so this Award is a huge vote of confidence in the service," he concluded.

For more information on the Award winners, visit http://www.datacentreawards.com, and for further information on Claranet and its Virtual Data Centre service, visit: www.claranet.co.uk

For more information or media enquiries, please contact the press office:
Rob Jessel / Robin Campbell-Burt
Spreckley Partners Public Relations
E: claranet@spreckley.co.uk
T: +44 (0)20 7388 9988

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About Claranet
Founded in 1996, Claranet has evolved from being a pioneering ISP (Internet Service Provider) into an MSP (Managed Services Provider) with annual revenues of around £72 million. We have more than 500 employees, with an international footprint in six countries and although Claranet has grown internationally, the focus has always been on local service, out of local offices, using local data centres.

Claranet brings together the best people, process and technology to provide flexible, secure and cost-effective managed services that guarantee network and application performance. We allow customers to focus on their core business, not IT management.