September 24, 2003 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — E-commerce provider Digital River (digitalriver.com) announced today the opening of a new European data center, a deployment the company said will add to the scalability, availability and reliability of its e-commerce infrastructure.
The company did not disclose the center’s location.
Digital River said the European facility has been integrated with its two existing U.S. data centers and is being used to help manage the online stores and e-commerce operations it hosts for more than 34,000 clients.
The new facility, the company added, is designed to improve service for its European customer base, a process complicated by changing and elaborate value-added tax (VAT) requirements throughout the European Union.
“Because we are responsible for the day-to-day operations of tens of thousands of e-commerce sites, it is mission critical for us to have a technology infrastructure in place that is highly scalable, reliable and secure,” said Joel Ronning, CEO of Digital River. “To that end, we’ve designed our e-commerce system to respond on a moments notice to peaks in online traffic, periods of seasonality and unpredictable world events that might impact Internet activities. With our European data center in place, we have added 33 percent more bandwidth to our e-commerce system and the capacity to quickly and seamlessly balance loads across multiple continents.”
Digital River uses a “pod architecture” to balance loads between server pods in each of the three data centers, creating at least 50 percent excess capacity to meet varying transactions volumes.
