SCIENCE

Internap Network Services Corporation has announced that Rhapsody, the number-one digital music subscription service in the United States, has moved its Seattle-based data center to Internap's newly expanded colocation facility in the Seattle area of Washington. The Internap facility provides a state-of-the-art green environment that also optimizes availability and IP network performance, ensuring that Rhapsody's catalog of more than ten million music tracks are accessible to its subscribers.

Rhapsody provides customers with on-demand access to millions of songs across a range of devices, including PCs, mobile phones, MP3 players and Internet-connected TVs. Consumers are turning to digital music services as a primary way of buying and listening to music, with research from Nielsen SoundScan showing that online music sales accounted for 40 percent of U.S. music purchases in 2009. Digital music providers are in turn demanding that data center facilities can guarantee service levels around the availability of their music libraries to subscribers.

"As part of our transformation to an independent company, the decision around where to colocate our data center infrastructure was paramount," said Paul Vandegrift, director of partner and vendor management at Rhapsody. "Internap provides all of the critical elements we are looking for – including an eco-conscious approach that aligns with our own corporate green standards. They also offer a highly reliable IP network that delivers an optimal subscriber experience through rapid, constant access to our comprehensive music library. Solving latency is critical to our business model, and Internap's solution gives us peace of mind."

Responding to continued market demand, Internap recently added 7,500 square feet of net sellable space to its Seattle-area data center, marking the third expansion of the facility and bringing it to a total of 20,000 square feet. The expanded facility incorporates the latest in green design and best practices to maximize power and cooling efficiencies, including roof-top cooling units, high-efficiency lighting, "drop ceilings" and ultrasonic humidification technology.

As with all Internap data centers, the Seattle area location utilizes the company's Performance IP network, which uses patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer (MIRO) technology to analyze network performance characteristics and deliver traffic over the fastest possible route. MIRO routes traffic over redundant, high-speed connections leveraging all of the major Internet backbones in each market, resulting in intelligent, optimized and highly-reliable delivery of customer content, applications and communications throughout the world. Because of the MIRO technology, Internap is able to offer a 100 percent uptime service level agreement.

"As more organizations outsource critical business infrastructure that houses customer-facing applications and services, the end user experience relies directly on the quality of the data center," said Scott Hrastar, SVP of IP services at Internap. "With richer business applications and operations moving to the Internet, through models such as SaaS and cloud computing, latency and network performance become the critical path to business performance, transparency and ROI. MIRO delivers these benefits by ensuring the highest possible availability and performance for companies such as Rhapsody."

Internap's data center offering includes secure, scalable colocation and managed hosting services with advanced monitoring and 24/7 live customer support. Customers can easily access its Performance IP network and Content Delivery Network (CDN) from its worldwide locations.