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Global electronic-payment technology giant Visa has increased its data center roster in time for the holiday shopping season – the company's busiest time. On Monday 16 november, the company announced the opening of its fourth data center – a 370,000-square-foot facility that houses more than 140,000 square feet of raised floor. The data center is capable of processing more than 10,000 transaction messages per second, Visa said in a statement.

“Few people recognize the critical role VisaNet plays in supporting our extensive brand acceptance, securing our products and facilitating payment innovation,” Visa CIO Mike Dreyer said in the statement. “As we activate our second new data center in four years and complete a transition to the latest information technology, we are laying the foundation for the future of Visa payments and related services.”

The company said the new data center (its second in the US) was located in eastern US bud did not disclose its exact location. The facility was a key milestone in Visa's technology upgrade that has taken place over several years. Each of the two synchronized North American data centers is capable of supporting the company's entire worldwide payment volume in case of downtime at any of the global locations.

IT equpment in the data center is running a new operating system Visa developed in partnership with IBM. z Transaction Processing Facility is a 64-bit operating system will allow for quicker and more complex transaction processing, as well as enhanced fraud analysis.

The data center is already processing transactions. The company has put the facility through a stress test and reported that it was able to handle message-volume beyond the volume observed at the height of the holiday shopping season. In 2008, VisaNet reported a peak rate of 8,442 transaction messages per second – a rate that was sustained for about one hour.

Visa data centers connect more than 16,000 financial institutions and millions of merchants and processing partners on three continents through more than 1,600 network endpoints. In the 12 months ending June 30, 2009, the company's total volume was about $4.3 trillion.