PAETEC Holding Corp. has announced plans for the deployment of a new data center in McLean, Va., approximately ten miles northwest of Washington, D.C. The center, which includes 49,000 square feet of raised floor space, will provide colocation services and geographic diversity to businesses and government entities along the East Coast and nationwide. The center also will support the shift to cloud computing as more business applications move towards advanced network-based services. The McLean center is planned to open at the end of 2011.

Planned services in the center include colocation space, power, and connectivity to PAETEC's diverse portfolio of network services as well as high-speed, fault-tolerant connections to the public Internet. Customers will have access to PAETEC's newest data center services including Dedicated Server, Virtual Server, Managed Cloud Storage, Hosted Exchange and Hosted Network Security Services.

"We selected this location specifically to meet the growing needs of the mid-Atlantic businesses as well as to support government applications," said Sanjay Hiranandani, PAETEC's chief technology officer. "When coupled with our strong portfolio of solutions, leading-edge IP network infrastructure and industry-leading service, we expect this data center to be considered one of the premier centers on the East Coast. Additionally, our fiber and fixed wireless infrastructure ensure that we can deliver the cloud-based services to end users virtually anywhere in the country at Gigabit and higher speeds."

The three-story, 62,500 square foot existing facility will be converted into data center space over the next seven months. Plans call for 49,000 square feet of raised floor space available to customers to collocate their servers, routers, and other systems and communication equipment. PAETEC will be hiring an incremental set of technical staff, complementing its broad engineering talent base to support this center. The location is also planned to have a 24x7 Technical Assistance Center (TAC), redundant power, and latest advancements in physical security, including precautions against flooding, fire and natural disasters.

The center continues PAETEC's legacy of geographic expansion of data centers enabling cloud-based services on a truly national basis. With the addition of McLean, PAETEC will have key data center facilities in Andover, MA; Bethlehem and Conshohocken, PA; Milwaukee, Houston, Phoenix, and Richmond, VA, augmenting its footprint of more than 100 physical colocation facilities nationwide.