Paetec Holding Corp., a company which provides data, voice and Internet solutions to business-class customers nationwide, opened an expansive, high-tech data center this summer in Andover. This new flagship center is meant to help customers maintain their critical data, server operating applications, network, and communications assets. It also represents a major step forward for the company towards supporting cloud computing, it said.
The center not only serves companies in New England, but those nationwide with a need for geographic redundancy or a presence on the East Coast for reduced latency. The two-story, 92,700 square feet facility includes nearly an acre of raised floor space available for customers to collocate their servers, routers, and other communication equipment.
"Moving business applications from the desktop to the cloud will bring efficiency not possible before," Arunas Chesonis, chairman and CEO of Paetec, said in a release. "With our expertise in telecommunications and data convergence, we're in a leading position to support the shift towards cloud computing and can provide our customers with a comprehensive set of managed service solutions to meet their business goals." The company says the Andover data center marks the first of many steps Paetec will take over the next 18 months to open eight more data centers across the country, with new centers in Houston, Milwaukee, and Phoenix scheduled for later this year. The Andover center will offer Data Backup and Recovery to ensure regulatory compliance, disaster preparedness, and business continuity, as well as dedicated hosted services and shared Web hosting based on a customer's need to either maintain complete administrative control or completely outsource network monitoring and management. "We're utilizing our more than ten years of data center experience along with our advanced portfolio of communication solutions," added Chesonis. "As a result, we've built an infrastructure that will responsibly serve our customers' needs now and in the future as we continue our data center expansion efforts, implement virtualization, and provide server consolidation, content acceleration, and software as a service offerings." Supported by a staff of 11 with a 24x7 Technical Assistance Center (TAC), the Andover center with connections to a diverse OC-48 fiber ring has redundant power to the grid, backed-up by five 1400 horsepower, one-megawatt generators with 30,000 gallons of diesel fuel. To keep the center at an optimum temperature for customer equipment, the center boasts 2000 tons of cooling capacity, which will pull from outside air in winter months to help reduce energy costs and overall consumption for increased efficiencies, according to a company release. Across the nation, Paetec has 1.4 million square feet or more than 32 acres of data center space. It says it serves customers in financial services, government, healthcare, higher education, and hospitality industries.
