What’s Aruba’s vision for supporting the digital infrastructure needs of international operators and content providers?

Aruba’s vision for supporting the digital landscape began when it launched in 1994, offering web-based services. As the company grew as an IT player, it decided to build its own data centres – opening the first two in Arezzo, in central Italy.

It also set up a huge data centre campus covering 200,000 square metres in Bergamo, which benefits from being close to the hub of Milan, while providing the opportunity to access independent paths to locations like Switzerland, and Frankfurt in Germany.

A year ago, Aruba then took another step by opening its first facility – IT4 – on its new campus in eastern Rome, which extends over an area of 74,000 square metres and will ultimately include five buildings with the potential for 30MW of IT power. Our vision with this is to capture more traffic to the south of Italy, and from areas like the Balkans and North Africa.

How does the Rome campus act as a strategic asset in attracting players?

For domestic players in southern Italy, it has the potential to improve connectivity and reduce latency by as much as half compared with Milan. For international players, it’s also a good moment to build extra infrastructure for redundancy and geopolitical stability.

In addition, more infrastructure is coming to Rome, with submarine cables like Sparkle’s BlueMed and Unidata’s Unitirreno landing in the city. We want to contribute to this growing ecosystem, helping to create real value for customers.

Rome is also a place where you can find power availability and access to domestic mainland network infrastructure in central and southern Italy. These factors mean it’s becoming attractive for cloud service providers, content delivery networks and the likes of SD-WAN service providers, which have been coming to us with an interest in establishing points of presence [PoPs].

In what ways do Aruba’s approach and partnerships set it apart from other data centre providers?

In Rome, for instance, in line with our philosophy for other data centres, we aim to provide a truly carrier-neutral and hyperconnected hub aided by cost effective cross-connects, the scale of available capacity and the presence of plenty of network infrastructure.

The attractiveness of our approach is reflected by the deals Aruba has already done with a range of partners to establish PoPs in Rome over the past year, including Sparkle, Arelion and EXA Infrastructure.

Indeed, we quickly filled around 60% of the capacity of the first building and are in the final stages of constructing the second one, with an anticipated release of its first capacity on the market by the end of next year.

How is Aruba addressing the issue of sustainability in data centres?

From the start, we design and construct our data centres with a green approach in mind, while leveraging specific resources in the areas where we build in an environmental way.

For example, in Bergamo, we use water from under the ground to cool our facilities. The water is in a perfect condition to be used for cooling our data centres in the most efficient way. After the cooling process, the water is returned back to the ground, with the only difference being a slight increase in temperature, ensuring a fully sustainable cycle.

Among other measures, we have large-scale photovoltaic installations in our data centres to produce renewable energy and have been establishing hydroelectric plants across Italy, while we’re also working to meet Europe’s Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact targets set for 2030 and promoting the initiative. Our approach to being green is not only words, but a strong commitment.

What role does Aruba hope to play in the long-term digital infrastructure landscape?

We want to grow our brand awareness in Europe and beyond, becoming more widely recognised as a trusted partner with world-class, certified and sustainable infrastructure.

In terms of further data centres, we need to learn from the market as it evolves where the next ones need to be built, whether in Italy or internationally. But we want to use the expertise that we’ve acquired at Aruba in the last 30 years to continue to grow while providing high-quality services.