FairPoint sees disaster recovery services driving data center growth

FairPoint Communications is seeing a growing demand for its emerging retail data center business coming from businesses that want to implement a disaster recovery (DR) plan.

Businesses can use FairPoint's data center facilities as either primary or secondary data center sites or as part of a disaster recovery strategy.

Chris Alberding, FairPoint Communications vice president of Product Management, told FierceTelecom that a number of its retail business customers want to complement their primary data center locations by replicating their mission critical data in a FairPoint facility.

"The medium to large customers are starting to look for more disaster recovery options," Alberding said. "In fact, four out of our first five sales were DR sites for customers so they have a primary facility, but they needed something that was geographically dispersed."

The telco has been responding to this demand by recently announcing plans to open a new data center in Manchester, N.H., this April. At the Manchester data center, FairPoint is attracting customers that are either trying to expand their current data centers, don't have the space or are looking to build an initial center with a third-party provider.

Already, the service provider has one contract with an unnamed customer that's going to purchase up to 1,000 feet of space at the new facility.

FairPoint opened its first data center in Laconia, N.H., in June 2014.

Alberding said that by locating a data center in Laconia, the company is meeting the requirements to have a geographically dispersed site for business customers.

"The general requirement is if you're 60 miles away or further it meets most requirements for most DR sites, especially for banking and health care," Alberding said. "They have a minimum 60 mile distance requirement from your primary and secondary site."

The service provider's Data Center Services offer customers a flexible, pay-as-you-grow leasing model, with configurations ranging from half-rack and full-rack to customized cages. Account managers can then work with customers to develop customized plans to address their specific requirements.

At the same time, FairPoint's data center customers have access to a 16,000-route-mile fiber network and can leverage its Carrier Ethernet Services at speeds up to 1 Gbps.

New Hampshire is just one of the various markets where FairPoint is going to build out its data center facilities.

Looking forward, Alberding said the service provider plans to convert existing central offices (COs) into new data centers in both Maine and Vermont.

"We have evaluated different CO sites because they are perfect places for data centers," Alberding said. "They are already hardened buildings, are already on our core network, have high security so it does not take a lot besides building out the space for cooling and power to turn it into a data center."

For more:
- see the release

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