West Virginia, Kansas City data centers on track for government business
Connecting state and local government leaders
Two data center operators recently announced plans to open colocation facilities targeting government customers.
DC Corp is launching a first data center in Martinsburg, W.Va., with an eye toward government customers. With 22 federal agencies already operating in West Virginia, Chuck Asbury, the company’s CEO, said he hopes the new data center in Martinsburg will appeal to government.
Only 90 miles from Washington, D.C., but “outside the blast zone,” the Tier 3 facility will provide backup, disaster recovery or live hosting services as well as the option for organizations to build out the space as they see fit.
With its access to dark fiber and Internet2, the company’s main focus will be federal customers and higher education institutions, Asbury told Data Center Knowledge. Groundbreaking will be in October with the first section of the facility coming online in the second quarter of 2014.
Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Mo., Hunt Midwest Real Estate Development announced that it is breaking ground on the first phase of SubTropolis Technology Center (STC), an underground, mission-critical data center. LightEdge Solutions, a cloud computing, colocation and consulting company, will be the anchor tenant for STC and will open the first phase of its 60,000-square foot underground operation, built to Tier 3 standards, in the first quarter of 2014.
With LightEdge as the “proof of concept,” Hunt Midwest will market STC to government agencies and larger enterprise users who want to operate their own data centers, according to Data Center Knowledge.
SubTropolis can provide a secure location for government data centers because of the underground facility’s ability to withstand natural disasters, including F5 tornadoes, and other security threats, according to a report in the Kansas City Business Journal.
SubTropolis Technology Center is served by dark fiber capable of carrying 80 10-gigabit/sec waves, far beyond the 1 gigabit service Google is bringing to Kansas City’s residential customers via Google Fiber, Mike Bell, general manager for Hunt Midwest’s industrial/commercial development division, told the Business Journal.