The OHM-neutral hub designed by In-site continues its expansion confirming itself as the nerve center of data traffic in Europe and the Mediterranean: there are already 6 national Carriers, 10 local internet service providers and 3 new terrestrial 'digital highways'.

More than three years after its inception, the Sicilian technology hub in Carini, desired by the Open Hub Med consortium and designed by In-Site, is a key asset for the country's digitization and Italy's restart after the Covid emergency and is preparing to expand its structure.

“Open Hub Med is a reality born from an innovative and highly ambitious project, aimed at making Italy a bridge between European internet infrastructures and those of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Today we are proud to be able to announce its significant expansion that will make new resources available to national and international telecom operators, large content and cloud service providers and Italian companies, consolidating its open model for exchanging Internet traffic in the Mediterranean basin,” said Valeria Rossi, President of Open Hub Med. “In recent years Open Hub Med has accelerated the process of investing in infrastructure in Sicily and from Sicily to Northern Italy and Europe for the benefit of developing a digital ecosystem covering the entire peninsula seen, as a whole, as a neutral digital hub in the geography of international data traffic.”

The Carini (Palermo) hub represents the first carrier-independent, neutral technology hub in Southern Italy and hosts technology equipment from operators, content providers, enterprises and Public Administration and is home to a hub of MIX, Italy's largest Internet Exchange.

“We believed from the beginning that this hub had all the potential to become a strategic point for the digitization of Italy and Europe,” commented Pietro Matteo Foglio, CEO & Founder of In-Site and partner of Open Hub Med who has been involved in the planning from the beginning. “The exponential growth of data traffic in recent years and the widespread experiences of smart-working, e-learning and e-commerce in these months of emergency should make us reflect on the importance of hosting such neuralgic centers on Italian soil. Data centers today, like banks during the Renaissance, are truly strategic assets, capable of offering significant competitive advantages.”

The emergency generated by Covid has well demonstrated how critical it is to efficiently manage data exchange: Open Hub Med offers capacity, security, and resilience to cope with the increase in internet traffic, particularly in an area like the Mediterranean, a natural hub of submarine cables connecting India, the Middle and Far East with Africa, Europe, South and North America. The 1,000-square-meter data center in Carini was designed by In-Site in 2016 with state-of-the-art technologies and according to the highest industry standards in order to ensure the best possible service continuity, security, reliability. The success of the initiative has led to further expansion of the space today.

“The scalable structure in internal infrastructures, energy efficiency, symmetry and redundancy that have characterized the project since its inception have allowed us to make available to companies with relative ease and speed two new IT Data Rooms totaling about 150 square meters, the activation of as many as 42 new racks, 2N redundancy and 3-6 kW/rack power,” concluded Pietro Matteo Foglio.