Milan, Italy, home to the national stock exchange and a major financial center, is now fast becoming a major hub for international connectivity, featuring data centers and interconnection opportunities that offer a strategic and cost-effective alternative to Frankfurt and Marseille.

Enter, for example, recently announced the addition of a neutral interconnection facility, MIL2, which is an extension of its current facility, MIL1. MIL2 will provide enhanced connectivity at Enter’s Milan Caldera data center campus. It’s Meet-Me Room was purpose-built to facilitate affordable cross-connects to a variety of content providers and carriers.

Enter’s data centers provide a strong environment for telco colocation, offering customers redundant power distribution as well as a generator that provides five days of backup power at full load for business continuity.

MIL2 will utilize Enter’s expansive backbone and metro dark fiber network, providing access to hundreds of networks within the Caldera campus as well as the ability to seamlessly connect to additional local network providers and remote facilities in the Milan area. Additionally, nearby landing points in Bari and Palermo provide access to submarine cables Southeast Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 5 (SEA-ME-WE 5) and Asia-Africa-Europe (AAE-1).

“We expanded our neutral interconnection facility to provide customers with cost-effective, reliable interconnection opportunities. Located in one of Italy’s key connectivity and fiber hubs, our Milan Caldera data centers offer a strategic and cost-effective alternative to Frankfurt and Marseille,” stated Milko Ilari, Head of International Business & Strategy at Enter. “In addition to serving as a bridge for operators looking to expand their reach to or within Western Europe, MIL2 is also designed to accommodate unique project requirements as well as facilitate mutually beneficial partnerships amongst our customers.”

The company’s partner-centric and transparent approach to business is also evident in its recent Open Compute Project (OCP) hardware deployment for MIL2’s Enter Cloud Suite (ECS).  Launched by Facebook, the OCP offers open source design for racks, servers and data center facilities. This lowers vendor lock-in and increases community participation in data center management. By utilizing OCP, companies can significantly reduce capital and operational expenditures while driving innovation through the incremental contribution of the open source community.

ECS, it should be noted, is the first European, OpenStack-based cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution. Using just one connection to Enter, small to mid-size communication service providers can cost-effectively expand their network footprint and reach all of Europe’s leading IXs. Besides ECS, Enter also offers Ethernet, Colocation and Internet access services, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), dark fiber, and data center services at MIL2.

For more information about Enter, click here.