Compass Datacenters has completed a customer lease agreement for an enterprise-class data center facility in Durham, NC, located within the prestigious Research Triangle Park (RTP). The agreement is with Windstream Hosted Solutions, which also recently signed an agreement for a Compass data center in suburban Nashville. Compass Datacenters will construct a standalone data center facility for Windstream in a data center campus that Compass is developing on land recently acquired in Durham. The 22,000-sq-ft center, which is scheduled to begin operation in 2013, will open with 10,000 sq ft of raised floor space, and will accommodate expansion up to four times that amount.
The Durham facility, which will be staffed around the clock from an onsite Network Operations Center, will support Windstream’s cloud infrastructure offerings, including public, private and hybrid cloud computing solutions. It dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications in organizations, allowing enterprises to rapidly deploy additional capacity on an as-needed basis without capital investments, so they can reshape their environment on demand.
The Windstream center will also initially feature 2500kVA of utility capacity and 300 tons of cooling capacity. It also incorporates connectivity to multiple Windstream core POP sites through redundant OC-192 10Gbps circuits, ensuring maximum uptimes for companies that require continuous access to their key information and infrastructure.
“Durham is an important part of our rapidly growing IT infrastructure nationwide. As more companies outsource key elements of their networks, it is vital for us to meet both the immediate demand, as well as to prepare for the anticipated growth,” said Kip Turco, senior vice president of Data Center Operations at Windstream Hosted Solutions. “Compass is enabling us to respond to our clients’ requirements as we expand. Its solutions meet our technical needs, and its experts have the ability to work with us to quickly implement them.”
“Raleigh-Durham has long had the potential to become a major data center market because of Research Triangle Park, the large universities in the area and the number of corporate and regional headquarters in the region. Our research indicated that there are a sizable number of customers in Raleigh-Durham for the standalone, dedicated data centers we build, which is why we are making such a significant investment in the area with a data center campus that is approved by the city and already under construction,” said Chris Crosby, Founder and CEO of Compass Datacenters. “We are proud to be playing a leadership role in helping build Raleigh-Durham’s data center infrastructure, and this customer agreement is a great validation of our investment in the area.”
Crosbyadded: “Companies like Windstream want to have dedicated data centers exactly where they need them, rather than having to locate their data center in a far-off city, share space in a multi-tenant facility, or spend an outrageous amount on a custom facility. No one else in Raleigh-Durham offers the kind of standalone data center solutions we offer: A custom, branded, Tier III certified data center that is dedicated exclusively to the customer without the need to share important components like the loading dock or storage and staging facilities. Customers also want enhanced control over their data centers and simplified capacity planning, which is also a unique benefit of our solutions.
