Windstream Hosted Solutions has announced it has begun a significant expansion to its Raleigh data center, one which will grow the facility’s usable space by almost 50 percent to 32,000 sq ft.

The expansion is needed to keep up with the company’s fast-growing customer base and its demands for cloud-based services, such as secure storage. It will enable the placement of at least an additional 365 customer cabinets that provide a combination of co-located and managed hosting services, with an emphasis on the full range of Windstream Hosted Solutions’ managed and cloud-based offerings. The expansion is scheduled to be completed by the end of the third quarter and is the third addition to the Raleigh data center in the last five years.

“The demand for data center outsourcing is skyrocketing as more companies move toward cloud-based infrastructures,” said Kip Turco, senior vice president of data center operations at Windstream Hosted Solutions. “By anticipating the needs of our existing and future customers, we’re continuing to deliver the necessary infrastructure and scalability our customers require to meet their business needs.”

Windstream Hosted Solutions’ expansion of its Raleigh data center includes:

• Full electrical system redundancy, which provides for continuity in case of a catastrophic system failure;
• Thirty-six-in. raised floors, enabling superior airflow, and allowing for the proper cooling of higher density cabinets;
• Robust per-rack power density of 5.5kW per cabinet, enabling Windstream Hosted Solutions customers to power more equipment in a single rack, which is especially important in cloud and virtualization environments;
• State-of-the-art, high-efficiency chill-water based cooling systems.

This expansion of the Raleigh data center is the third data center expansion project for the company in three months. Windstream Hosted Solutions completed a major expansion of its Boston data center in May, opened its third data center in Charlotte, NC, in April, and is constructing a new data center in Little Rock, AR. Windstream also manages and operates data centers in Raleigh, Cary, and Charlotte, NC; Newton, IA; State College and Ephrata, PA; Jacksonville, FL; Atlanta; Nashville, TN; and Brookfield, WI.

A trusted data center partner to both small- to mid-size businesses as well as large Fortune 100 companies, Windstream Hosted Solutions provides enterprise-class managed hosting solutions for data storage, cloud computing, network and security, OS management and middleware service management, DBA services and disaster recovery.