Redstation has become the first UK data centre operator to sign up to a new 100Gbit/s service from Virgin Media Business (VMB) in order to help it cope with the ever-rising demand for network capacity due to the rise in cloud computing services.

The 100Gbit/s service is a new offering from VMB that is claimed to be the fastest on the market to date. Jeff Wollen, executive sales director of partner markets and public sector at VMB said the firm had introduced the new service to keep pace with rising data demands.

He said: “Businesses are getting more and more data hungry with every passing day. As they become more reliant on cloud services, and mobile working technology to run their operations they need faster and more reliable data transfer between sites.”

Redstation, which owns data centre locations in Gosport, Hampshire and in Docklands in London, is the first firm to sign up to the service. It hosts thousands of servers running applications, email accounts and websites for clients based in over 100 countries.

This ever-growing demand for its services forced the firm to look at ways of improving access to the data stored in its locations, and upgrading the network connections between the data centre and major exchanges was a key part of this.

Martin Groom, managing director, at Redstation, told V3 that the updated network – which will be live by September – will more than double its overall capacity from 80Gbit/s to 180bit/s in order to ensure customers’ connections remain stable.

“Over the last 18 months we have seen the demand for bigger network connections, and greater bandwidth come to fruition because of cloud computing and a lot of larger customers are offering apps that are pretty bandwidth intensive,” he said.

“We need to be running at around 40-50 percent capacity in order to avoid issues of packet loss or latency, so we have to be operating in the gigabit-per-second range.”

The service from VMB is now available to any interested firms. V3 contacted VMB for pricing information but had received no information at the time of publication.