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 on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, in Houston. In addition to serving Houston, the company plans to increase capacity out of the site, and will be able to offer additional high bandwidth services to San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas by the end of the year.

Located within PAETEC's Houston central office, the data center will help customers maintain and protect their critical data, server operating applications, network, and communications assets. It will offer traditional services such as cabinets, power and space as well as a suite of network-based services.

The Houston center joins existing data centers in Bethlehem and Conshohocken, Pa., and a center in Andover, Mass., which just opened last month, as well as additional locations planned for Milwaukee and Phoenix by the end of the year.

"The further expansion of our data center capabilities is a reflection of our commitment to our customers' needs and towards supporting cloud computing," said Arunas Chesonis, chairman and CEO, PAETEC. "Over the next five years, we will continue to strategically drive this expansion in order to support customers nationwide that have a need for geographic redundancy and reduced latency."

PAETEC's data center solutions are hosted in its highly secure central office and data center collocation sites around the country. The new data center reserves more than 2,200 square feet of PAETEC's office space located on North Freeway in Houston. Supported by an 24x7 Technical Assistance Center (TAC), the Houston center has connections to a diverse OC-48 SONET ring, and is backed up by a one-megawatt generator with more than 1,550 gallons of diesel fuel. To keep the center at an optimum temperature for customer equipment, the center boasts 90 tons of advanced dual circuit cooling capacity.

"This expansion demonstrates a significant investment we're making in the Houston area," said Dean Yeck, vice president and general manager of the Texas office. "I believe our product set is unlike any other carrier, and this new data center will give an additional host of new options for high-tech Texas businesses."