Polish telecommunications operator Orange Polska (Orange Poland), a subsidiary of French group Orange S.A. (EPA: ORA), has brought online a new data centre in Warsaw.

The 400 sq m (4,305 sq ft) facility will house Orange Polska’s systems and become one of the key nodes of the operator’s network.

Julien Ducarroz, president of Orange Polska, said: “For years, we have been consistently investing significant amounts in the development of our network and services in order to meet the growing needs of our clients.

“Polish companies are increasingly willing to digitise, more and more often they choose cloud solutions. Warsaw Data Hub will significantly increase our collocation potential, and we can also expand this facility if necessary.”

In a time when outages have brough the social world to a standstill, Orange Polska said its data centres have never been brought offline since the first infrastructure was deployed in 2005.

Grzegorz Chudzik, member of the management board of Warbud SA, the general contractor of the project, said: “The Warsaw Data Hub for Orange Polska is one of the most innovative facilities of this type in Poland, both in terms of the technologies used, security standards and pro-ecological solutions. Warbud designed and executed the facility in a flash of 14 months.”

According to PMR Report “Data center market in Poland 2020 – Market analysis and development forecasts for 2020-2025”, data centre net space and commercial server rooms in Poland is set to grow by an average of 7.9% until 2025 exceeding 90,000 sqm whilst MW power is set to grow at a rate of 13.9% from 87MW in 2020 to 166MW by mid-decade.

Orange is one of the few large telco players who are still building and managing their own data centre portfolio after a selling off wave swiped through the telecom world in recent years with, for example, Telefonica, AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink and Windstream offloading some or the entirety of their data centre portfolios in deals valued at hundreds of millions of US dollars.