Time Warner Cable ups its cloud ante with $82M Charlotte data center

Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) on Friday opened up its National Data Center East on its Charlotte, N.C. campus, targeting residential services and cloud services for business clients.

The $82 million National Data Center is a 178,000 square-foot facility that includes 1,600 racks of equipment and four 12,000 square-foot data halls. Next to the data center, TWC has built a four-story, 103,500 square-foot administrative office building.

While a major priority of the data center is to support TWC's residential e-mail and billing records, it can also be used to address emerging cloud service opportunities with its business service customers. TWC will be able to bolster its cloud services drive with the NaviSite assets it purchased last year, which will be supported in the new data center.

Offering cloud services out of a North Carolina-based data center will enable TWC to compete more effectively with all members of the growing cloud ecosystem, especially as they target larger businesses.

TWC, which has established itself as a business services player with a focus on Ethernet, can use the new data center to attract more of its own multisite business customers that need access to the North Carolina market.

North Carolina has become a hotbed of data center activity amongst traditional telcos, including CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) via Savvis and Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN) via Hosted Solutions, and IT and applications providers like Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN). TWC's move reflects that competitive trend.

For more:
- here's FierceCable's coverage
- see the release

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