Lance Crosby, SoftLayer's CEO, says that the companies had already been working together over the last few months and that formalizing the relationship was a natural next step.

Under the terms of the agreement, EIRCA's existing servers will migrate to SoftLayer's facilities where all its new servers will be deployed as well. According to the press release, "the partnership also makes EIRCA Softlayer's preferred partner for customers deploying managed H-Sphere Clusters."

EIRCA says it currently serves over 105,000 domains and has supported H-Sphere clusters for international customers since 2002. H-Sphere, now owned by Web hosting software provider Parallels (parallels.com), is a scalable automation control panel for multi-server Web hosting  services and powers over approximately 1.7 million websites, says the press release.

"We searched for a data center provider that shares our philosophy towards customer service with an infrastructure we can deliver to our customers with 100 percent confidence," says Simon O'Rourke, founder and CEO of EIRCA. "After testing multiple providers over several years, we found SoftLayer to be the best."

Last week, SoftLayer was selected to be the hosting provider for game guild hosting provider MMO Guildsites.