Xelent earlier - Stack Data Network

Activities

For 2020:

• Hybrid clouds based on Mail.Ru Cloud Solutions and Customer infrastructure
• Private clouds on HPE server equipment clusters in Xelent Data Center or Customer Data Center
• Public cloud on VMware a consumption-based basis, and Russia Belarus Kazakhstan
• Services of different cloud providers within one contract and from one window
• Migrate between clouds, to and from any cloud

History

2021

Rosatom plans to expand Xelent data center

At the end of March 2021, it became known about Rosatom's plans to expand the Xelent data center, which had previously been bought for 2 billion rubles. About 1.1 billion rubles can be spent on capacity building.

According to Kommersant, citing the general director of Atomdat Center (a subsidiary of Rosenergoatom; engaged in the construction of data centers) Sergey Nemchenkov, it is planned to increase the capacity of the data center to 1.5 thousand against 954 by the end of March 2021.

Rosatom invests 1 billion rubles in the bankrupt data center Xelent

After transferring the facility to Atomdata Center, we plan to launch a project for the necessary additional equipment for energy elements, which in a short time will give us an additional 250 resistant seats for commercial implementation, and in the future - 1.5  thousand racks, "he said.

According to Stanislav Mirin, a leading analyst at the iKS-Consulting , the purchase of a ready-made working data center, which is Xelent, allows Rosatom to increase the chances of entering the five largest Russian data center service providers for the next few years.

Peter Tsarkov, an expert at the Softline Infrastructure Solutions Department, believes that a comprehensive modernization is needed for the full-fledged operation of the data center, the cost of which is comparable to the construction of a new data center.

The head of the association of market participants TsODIgory Dorofeev in a conversation with the publication expressed confidence that Rosatom and its subsidiaries will continue their policy of aggressive capacity building in the coming years. According to him, the state corporation will probably build new data centers, as well as buy up existing facilities. It is possible to consolidate the market in which Rosatom intends to become one of the largest players, squeezing Rostelecom, he added. Experts interviewed by the newspaper believe that Rosatom intends to become a provider of data storage services, primarily for the public sector.^[1]

Rosatom bought the bankrupt Xelent data center

On March 23, 2021, Rosatom announced the closure of the acquisition of the Xelent data center. The buyer was Atomdata Center (an integrator of the infrastructure of commercial data centers, part of Rosenergoatom).

Xelent was sold ВЭБ.РФ as part of an auction at an initial price of 2 billion rubles. The capacities and infrastructure of this data center are planned to be used both for Rosenergoatom's own needs and for current and new commercial customers, the Rosatom press service said.

By March 2021, more than 350 companies use Xelent services. The data center is designed to accommodate more than 70 thousand pieces of IT equipment. Rosatom notes that this is the first commercial data center in St. Petersburg, certified according to the Tier III Design standard.

Rosatom acquired the bankrupt Xelent data center

The acquisition of Xelent was carried out as part of the implementation of the program for the development of the geo-distributed and disaster-tolerant network of Rosatom data centers. Earlier, the state corporation launched the Kalininsky data center and began to build the Innopolis data center with a total capacity of 16 MW, which could become the largest in the Volga Federal District.

Rosenergoatom's strategy for developing the direction of data centers provides for entering the Top 5 market participants in data centers by 2025, "says Sergey Nemchenkov, general director of Atomdata Center, commenting on the deal with Xelent. - North-West is one of the priority regions of presence both in terms of closing our internal needs and in terms of commercial prospects. The acquisition of a ready-made data center will make it possible to realize our strategic tasks as efficiently as possible.

The ВЭБ.РФ, in turn, noted that the state corporation realized its function as an institution of development, ensuring the preservation of an existing large enterprise, the continuity of its activities and the transfer of it to a new investor.^[2]

2020: ВЭБ.РФ sells Xelent data center

December 23, 2020 ВЭБ.РФ announced the sale of the largest St. Petersburg data center in Xelent. Public bidding is scheduled for February 2021. The initial cost of the asset will be about 2 billion. rubles

According to the press service of the state development corporation, the transaction will be held in coordination with the management of Stack Date Network LLC (owns Xelent data centers) and a specialized investor who will be able to ensure the further development of the data center, maintain a high level of service and support existing and new customers.

ВЭБ.РФ sells Xelent data center in St. Petersburg

The winner at the auction will be the participant who offered the highest value for this asset. The property of the center date is subject to sale in a single lot. The tender documentation approved by the ВЭБ.РФ provides for only the first and repeated tenders.

By December 23, 2020, large public and private investors are showing interest in the data center, but their names are not disclosed. As for the data center, more than 350 companies use its services.

This data center was created with the support of ВЭБ.РФ in the amount of 2.2 billion rubles. Due to unfulfilled obligations of the company, ВЭБ.РФ initiated the bankruptcy procedure. On February 20, 2020, it was declared bankrupt with the amount of more than 3 billion rubles of principal and 268.9 million rubles of penalties, including secured property. Stack Date Network continues to work, despite the bankruptcy proceedings.

Despite certain stereotypes in society regarding bankruptcy proceedings, ВЭБ.РФ as an institution of development, he sees in such a procedure the possibility of maintaining a business. Supporting the activities of an enterprise that has fallen into bankruptcy, ВЭБ.РФ is able to ensure the maximum attractiveness of the asset to the market. This is possible when we have control over the asset, as in the case of Stack Date Network LLC, "said Mikhail Kuzovlev, first deputy chairman of the ВЭБ.РФ.[3]

2017

80% revenue growth

The Xelent data center summed up the work in 2017. For the year, Xelent's revenue grew by 80%. At the end of the year, Xelent took 25% of the St. Petersburg market for equipment placement services in the data center

As noted, Xelent has become one of the few IT companies and the only data center operator to undergo a full rebranding this year. The renaming especially positively affected the development of the cloud services direction: the company managed to attract more than 300 new corporate customers.

The growth driver was the offering of cloud services: the launch of the Cloud Xelent automated cloud platform, which provides virtual resources based on the VMWare hypervisor, and the MultiCloud solution, an aggregator of cloud services from different providers, based on various virtualization technologies under the same contract.

Another Xelent service launched on September 15, 2017 is the placement of mining equipment. For this direction, the company has developed a special versatile Xelent Rig case, which allows energy-efficient and safe placement of hardware for cryptocurrency mining. Literally in a month and a half, the data center management managed to place more than 1,500 pieces of equipment. An investment project is being implemented to organize additional infrastructure to meet demand.

Plans for 2018 include certification of data centers according to the Tier III standard at the Uptime Institute.

Rename to Xelent

In March 2017, the Stack Data Network (SDN) data center announced a rebranding and name change. Top managers of the company announced a new Xelent brand and a marketing strategy aimed at retaining leadership in the data center market. The data center also introduced the stack of cloud solutions of its own development.

Andrei Eliseev, director of the branch of the Xelent data center (formerly SDN) in St. Petersburg, presented the technical and economic results of the data center over the past three years.

Eliseev noted that for three years the data center has maintained leadership positions in St. Petersburg in terms of capacity, price and customer inflow. The data center of the company works with 100% Up-Time, that is, without a single failure for all three years of operation. Even during preventive work in the data center, the infrastructure works as usual thanks to the patented Stack.CUBE solution, which provides redundancy of cooling and power systems. According to data obtained by CNews after publication from Linxdatacenter, their data center in St. Petersburg has been operating without interruptions and demonstrates 100% Up-Time for 5 years^[4].

The simplicity and efficiency of infrastructure maintenance allows Xelent to save on hardware support and make customers more profitable pricing offerings. The company is increasing capacity with minimal costs: the data center is designed for 1,476 racks, and of which 1,074 have already been commissioned (6 server modules with 164 cells each). Three more modules will be launched soon.

Reliability of equipment, price leadership and a developed sales system positively affected the growth in the number of customers: 308 companies placed their equipment or rented the capacity of the Xelent data center (550 paid racks). More than 300 clients of the data center are regional and federal enterprises of various sizes and industry markets: trade, logistics, tourism, finance, etc.

Xelent experts noted that even in such a situation, the company receives the greatest income not from the regional entrepreneurial sector, but from large players in the digital market - content and IT providers. Their share (just over 5% of the total number of customers) accounts for up to 58% of revenue. In his opinion, the regional business is just coming to the understanding that with the digitalization of business processes, the company's income of any scale depends on the quality and level of reliability of its IT infrastructure. At the same time, there are more and more offers on the market every day.

Therefore, the company created a new bright brand Xelent, which was told by Ilya Rogov, marketing director of the data center. A survey conducted by the customer marketing department showed that the name SDN is associated primarily with technical terms and abbreviations, and not with company values ​ ​ - high-quality support, 100% "uptime" and attentive attitude. Therefore, the new name is linguistically associated with the English word 'Excellent' ("excellent"), which reflects the level of service and the approach to meeting the requests of the most demanding customers.

According to top managers of Xelent, the strategically correct approach to sales in the market is to gain leadership positions in the industry sector and offer such products that meet the quality criteria of the best world practices. Performance (KPI for infrastructure and service), operational efficiency of Xelent data center - the new SDN brand - are at the level of world market leaders.

Alexey Mishchenko, general director of the Xelent data center, also spoke about the impact of IT on regional business. In his opinion, today the concept of regional competition is disappearing for business. The consumer of the digital era gained access to any information, and now he selects the product mainly according to the quality criterion, draws attention to the approach and ideology of the company more than to the availability of goods in the region. A successful regional business should be able to compete with large players in the industry market and offer such a product or service that will fully satisfy the potential client for price and conditions.

Data centers offer solutions to save on deployment and infrastructure support: rental of capacities and servers, maintenance of equipment in suitable conditions. Alexey Mishchenko elaborated on the principles of the data center in 2014-2016. According to him, the three main "whales" of success are Stack.Cube and FreeCooling technologies, as well as the Greenfield concept (designing and building the data center "from scratch").

The topic of cost-effective solutions was continued by Pavel Voroshilov, director of cloud products at the Xelent data center. He spoke about the creation of a unique cloud service aggregator for the Russian market on the basis of the Xelent data center. The share of cloud data center services does not exceed 5% of the total, but by 2020 Xelent plans to increase it to 40%. Among other data centers will offer services SaaS (VDI- virtual desktops) and IaaS ('vDC' - virtual data center; 'VPS\VDS' - virtual server and 'cloud storage' - cloud storage). Fully virtual, not expensive, easily scalable cloud solutions, according to Pavel, will satisfy the needs of small and medium-sized businesses in St. Petersburg and will allow Xelent to strengthen its leading position in the regional market for DC outsourcing.

2015

Forum and show with VEB

On October 28, 2015, at the Open Innovations Technology Forum and Show, Vnesheconombank presented a technological project - the SDN data center. The data center in St. Petersburg became an illustration of the purpose of the event - the exchange of practical experience, the promotion of advanced research and development, the creation of new tools for international cooperation in the field of innovation. The SDN data center is a joint result of the development of domestic data center specialists, Western colleagues in engineering infrastructure and financial support of VEB.

At the event "SDN" and VEB (2015)

In the patented STACK.KUB technology, engineers integrated the cooling system with dynamic uninterruptible power supply devices and modular design.

During the incomplete two years of work DPC UDI , he attracted more than 250 customers to his technological platform, including:, VKontakte a group of companies, RU-CENTER (RBC) cloud operators and, Softline IT-Grad federal banks and large international companies.

At the event "SDN" and VEB (2015)

The construction of the SDN data center takes place with the participation of VEB.

At the event "SDN" and VEB (2015)

The SDN Data Center project is aimed at developing innovations in the field of information and communication technologies, introducing advanced energy saving technologies in the Russian Federation.

"The participation of the SDN data center in the Forum and the Open Innovations Technology Show at the VEB booth shows the focus of the bank's investment policy on the development of IT infrastructure in the Russian Federation. - noted Alexey Mishchenko, General Director of SDN LLC. "Since January 2014, the SDN Data Center has not only built a modern technological site with the highest reliability, safety and energy efficiency, but also filled the built capacity by more than 80%."

Late payments on VEB loan

On October 22, 2015, it became known that Stack Data Network (SDN) had overdue payment on the loan. Vnesheconombank (VEB) The economic difficulties encountered Russia are reflected in promising business, data centers they write. Vedomosti

As informed sources told the publication, SDN made a delay on VEB's loan, and now the latter can resell the loan. The interlocutor of the newspaper noted that before the bank considered this project one of the most reliable investments.

SDN overdue payment on VEB loan

The VEB press service confirmed "some lag in the project schedule" and associated it with "the general state of the economic situation and the dynamics of the ruble exchange rate." At the same time, SDN is actively increasing the number of racks in the data center, and the company is increasing revenue in accordance with the business model, the representative of the lender added.

VEB credits SDN with the construction of a data center in St. Petersburg since 2013. The bank agreed to allocate about 2.17 billion rubles for a project involving the launch of at least 984 server racks. By October 22, 2015, investment has not yet been completed.

According to the head of SDN Alexei Mishchenko, the company "slightly" lagged behind on the loan payment schedule. VEB has no complaints against SDN thanks to an agreement signed in September 2015 with the VKontakte social network, which will transfer 500 server racks to the SDN data center, Mishchenko said, adding that by October 2015 the service had already moved 20 racks, and full migration is expected in 1.5 years.^[5]

Stack Data Network launched VOLS

On June 29, 2015, Stack Data Network announced the commissioning of a fiber optic communication line (VOLS) to a large traffic exchange point at Miran Data Center, located on Pirogovskaya Embankment, 17.

With the launch of VOLS, a third independent transport network route was created connecting the SDN data center with the main traffic exchange points of St. Petersburg.

Length of cable route 20 km, capacity 96 fibres. It is routed along the route, does not intersect with two existing FVCs connecting the SDN data center with nodes of the citywide data network.

"We are systematically developing the SDN data center infrastructure in order to improve the reliability of our services. The built VOLS provides three-fold redundancy of data transmission and Internet access services that we provide to our customers. - noted Alexey Mishchenko, general director of SDN data center. "Our customer base is already generating huge data traffic, the ultra-reliable transportation of which is the most important task for us."

SDN LLC is the owner and service provider of the SDN.SPB modular data center for 1476 racks with a total power consumption of 14 MW (10 MW at the start), with an area of ​ ​ technological premises of 6500 m2; building area for client offices and maintenance personnel premises - 1500 m2. The engineering infrastructure of the data center by the time the facility is fully commissioned will include 12 DIBPs with a total output capacity of more than 14 MW, an industrial cooling system with a total capacity of 9600 kW. Two independent inputs 110/10 kW. The project is implemented in stages with the investment support of one of the leading financial institutions of Russia - Vnesheconombank.

2012

Stack Data Network (SDN) will open two new sites in St. Petersburg and Kazan in the second half of 2012. They will be designed for 1476 and 376 racks, respectively. SDN already accepts requests for placement of the companies in these data-processing centers (DPC). In the North-West region, an energy-efficient outsourcing data center with an area of ​ ​ 3.05 hectares will be located in the village of Pargolovo (a municipality within St. Petersburg). The project is based on the patented Stack.CUBE technology in 2011 . The fault tolerance level of this technology site is regulated by the recommendations of the international standard Concurrent Maintained (analogue of the level Tier III in the Uptime Institute classification). The capacity of the data center is put into operation in stages - as the existing server units are filled. SDN data center in Kazan will take 0.23 ha. It also complies with Concurrent Serviceable guidelines. The cooling system, which provides the optimal climate in the server bays, allows you to increase the load on the rack up to 10 kW and above without interruption.

Notes