DiData takes stake in Netforce to boost hosting prowess

Dimension Data has acquired a majority stake in privately-held hosting company NetForce to broaden the data centres from which it provides hosted services.

DiData - which offers hosting services through the BlueFire brand, another company in which it holds a majority share, now plans to consolidate the BlueFire and NetForce businesses. The combined entity will retain the BlueFire brand but base itself in NetForce's North Ryde office in western Sydney.

The IT services group said that the combined BlueFire and Netforce operation will "operate as an independent business".

NetForce boasts a Tier-2, 55-rack facility in North Ryde with an average of 4kVa of power allocated per rack.

Dimension Data will provide infrastructure-as-a-service from within the NetForce data centre alongside cloud computing services delivered from co-location facilities at Optus, Global Switch and Equinix.

New hosted services

In tandem with the NetForce investment, Dimension Data announced it is offering hosted messaging (exchange), backup, disaster recovery and storage.

"Organisations both large and small are increasingly looking to outsource their IT infrastructure - in part or in its entirety - to third-party services providers. Supplementing our traditional managed services capabilities, Dimension Data is now able to provide both the infrastructure and its support to our clients as a service over the Internet or ‘in the cloud'," said Keith Murray, Dimension Data's director of managed services.