CenturyLink opens Washington hydroelectric powered data center, enhances cloud, disaster recovery capabilities

CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) has opened a new data center in central Washington that operates on hydroelectric power, a move it says will enable enterprises to lower their power costs while serving as another site to deliver cloud and disaster recovery services.

Located in Moses Lake, Wash., the new facility will ultimately support up to 30 megawatts of IT load on the site, with an initial ramp to 8 megawatts.

This data center site, which is owned by Server Farm Realty and leased to CenturyLink, gets its electricity from hydroelectric generators powered by the nearby Columbia River. An additional benefit of the location is the central Washington climate also allows significant use of free-air cooling.

Customers can get access to on-site data center and network services as well as access to CenturyLink's cloud, colocation and managed services. What makes the site compelling from a disaster recovery perspective is that it has a seismic rating of 2B, which it says is the lowest rating in the western United States.

Kelly Quinn, research manager with IDC, said in a release that the potential of this new site "stems from the area's abundance of natural, power-generating resources, and its relative immunity from natural disasters."

The new hydroelectric powered data center in central Washington is just one of many moves the service provider has made as part of its environmental sustainability program. It follows the deployment of Bloom Energy fuel cells to power its multi-tenant data center located in southern California. CenturyLink has also pursued the Uptime Institute's Management & Operations certification by having its 57 global data centers evaluated for Management and Operations (M&O) certification.

Although first-quarter data and hosting services revenue declined year-over-year to $318 million, down from $328 million in the same period a year ago, CenturyLink continues to be aggressive with its data center rollout strategy.

Besides the central Washington data center, the service provider has been making a number of organic and inorganic moves to bolster its data center and cloud service capabilities. The telco recently established a presence in Australia's data center market via a partnership with Data-Center-as-a-Service provider NEXTDC Limited and acquired Orchestrate to deepen its cloud service portfolio with a new set of managed database service capabilities.

For more:
- see the release

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