BMIT Data Centre To Expand Data Centre In Malta

BroadGroup interviewed Emmanuel Bonnici, Sales Director of Malta’s 20,000 square foot BMIT Data Centre which is focused on the online gaming sector, to hear its plans for further expansion.

BMIT started as a business portal and ISP in Malta, serving the financial services industry in 1996. In 1999 the company advised the Maltese government on the first online gaming regulations which were introduced in the year 2000. As an ISP it provided connectivity and peering to other ISP’s internationally from its facility in Malta which became the basis of its 2,000 square metres dedicated Data Centre, of which around 500 square metres is used for its colocation services. BMIT’s Data Centre was the first in Malta to have connectivity to the Internet over two separate fibre-optic links – with cables provided by DataStream (part of Telecom Italia) and Vodafone with peering at the Milan Internet Exchange and the Brussels Internet Exchange.

The company is now facing a shortage of space and is expanding the building next year – which will provide another 250 square metres of space. Its long term plan is to find another location as a second Data Centre in Malta, with a minimum of 1,200 square metres.

BMIT’s speciality is to provide housing and colocation services specifically for the online gaming business. It helped the Maltese Government draft gaming legislation and now caters for 50 online gaming companies in the territory. The main requirements from the i-gaming sector are three-fold: first, a high power and cooling specification; second, complete redundancy for all parts of the Data Centre and third, a large number of bandwidth and IP suppliers so as to ensure complete network redundancy.

The requirement is to ensure that there are guarantees for infrastructure, hardware and network availability. BMIT guarantees that an i-gaming company’s network will be available for 99.96% of the time per month – excluding scheduled maintenance.

The company also provides its own VoIP gateway service and e-payment service (which allows online payment through a number of Tier One banks) for particular i-gaming customers, although it does not consider this service to be an essential part of a Data Centre provider’s portfolio. Typically electricity power is two circuits per rack at 32 amps per circuit. The market for online gaming services has been affected by recent US legislation banning operators from accessing the US market. But BMIT reports that interest from new operators is now increasing. Malta also faces competition from a number of new jurisdictions such as Cyprus who are initiating online legislation using Malta as a template, and is already attracting new providers.

operators to sell managed services into its client base and who can also afford the high degree of investment required in high specification facilities.

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