Telcos seem to have two methods for dealing with the existence of of data centres. The first is to bury the thing deep in the ground, swear everyone involved to silence and pretend that it doesn't exist. The second way is to construct an "in-your face" fortified utilitarian monolith that looks like something Stalin dreamed up after a particularly hard night on the vodka. Pretty they are not, nor have they ever been.

Until now.

PT Telecom, Portugal Telecom as was, has built and commissioned a state-of the-art data centre of simple and elegant external beauty combined with immense strength and security inside the facility. It's sited on the high mountain plain of Covilha and boasts the greenest of green credentials and is incredibly energy efficient. PT invested €99 million euros to make the new facility the cornerstone of its cloud services offerings with end-to-end services from storage and connectivity to security and cloud computing through its SmartCloud portfolio, delivered from the site.

Martyn Warwick spoke with PT CEO Zeinal Bava.