PAETEC Holding Corp. recently celebrated the grand opening of its newest data center in Phoenix.

The Phoenix data center offers businesses in the Southwest highly secure and scalable Colocation Services with capabilities up to one Gbps, supported by a 24x7 Technical Assistance Center (TAC).

PAETEC’s strategy in building data centers throughout its nationwide network is reinforced by a market that is poised for growth in 2011. According to Infonetics Research, data center network equipment has grown by 67 percent in 2010 over the previous year.1 Data service technologies that experienced the most consistent growth included Ethernet switches, application delivery controllers (ADCs), and WAN optimization appliances.

“We’ve seen the demand for data centers and network-based services increase, and we expect it to continue to pick up momentum over the next decade,” said Arunas Chesonis, chairman and CEO, PAETEC. “This new data center fits our strategy of enabling cloud-based technologies and business continuity options for our customers to safeguard information, decrease management needs, and reduce network latency.”

The statistics in Infonetics’ research show that an increasing number of companies are looking to outsource data storage. Moving data to a hosted cloud at a data center means that businesses won’t have to make room for on-site servers and can experience lower energy bills since the servers will not be on the premises.

PAETEC’s data center solutions are hosted in its highly secure central office and colocation sites around the country. The Phoenix center joins existing facilities in Bethlehem and Conshohocken, Pa., Andover, MA, Houston, and a Milwaukee center that opened in December 2010. This opening marks PAETEC’s 2011 kick-off in data center expansion, with plans to open several more throughout the year.

“Our overall strategy on data centers includes two significant drivers. First, we’re actively designing and building dedicated infrastructure space based on the rising demands of our customers, and secondly, building a robust suite of cloud-based products built for CIOs within our data centers in 2011,” said John Chapman, chief marketing officer for PAETEC.

The new 4,400-sq-ft Phoenix data center is supported by a 24/7 Technical Assistance Center (TAC) and backed by a 1.4-megawatt backup generator, UPS scalable to 800 kVA, and an FM-200 fire suppression system. To keep the center at an optimum temperature for customer equipment, 120 tons of circuit cooling capacity are employed, with the ability to increase to 240 tons.