PAETEC Holding Corp., a Fortune 1000 company which provides data, voice, and Internet solutions to business-class customers nationwide, celebrated the grand opening of a new data center today in Milwaukee. In addition to serving Milwaukee, the center plans to offer colocation for enterprise businesses throughout the Midwestern U.S. including Chicago, Madison, St. Louis, and the Twin Cities.

Located in the heart of downtown Milwaukee, the data center will provide customers with a secure facility for their critical data, networking, and communications infrastructure. Services will include space, power, and connectivity to private networks or the Internet. In addition, customers can work with PAETEC to develop personalized hosted server and storage solutions. Value added services such as Data Backup and Recovery and Shared Web Hosting will also be available.

“We looked at many sites in the mid-west, but ultimately determined that this location in Milwaukee would best support the needs of our customers,” said Jeff Howe, president of PAETEC’s central region. “This new data center extends our unmatched support of customers’ ever-changing and more complex needs with regards to data storage, security, and the shift towards cloud computing.”

PAETEC’s data center solutions are hosted in its highly secure central office and data center colocation sites around the country. The Milwaukee center joins existing data centers in Bethlehem and Conshohocken, PA, Andover, MA, and a center in Houston that opened in September. Continued expansion into 2011 is also expected, with a new planned facility in Phoenix.

The new data center utilizes approximately 3,000 sq ft of PAETEC’s office space located in downtown Milwaukee. Supported by a 24x7 Technical Assistance Center (TAC), the Milwaukee center has connections to 1,200 amps of incoming power from the local utility company, and is backed up by a Detroit Diesel 800-kW generator. To keep the center at an optimum temperature for customer equipment, the center will start with 120 tons of cooling capacity.

The center will contain full cabinets and half cabinets in order to help PAETEC customers with their various data needs. Each customer’s cabinet will have clean power delivered to it from an isolated circuit, which will allow for top-of-the-line performance.