CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) may be mulling the future of its data center business with a possible sale, but the telco's move to expand capacity in 8 centers shows that it still sees value in these assets.
Following the expansion of 14 megawatts of capacity in 2015, the service provider plans to increase capacity in four additional data centers. Since 2011, the service provider has completed 39 data center expansion projects and added 11 new data centers to its portfolio.
Today, the service provider offers about 2.62 million square feet of gross raised floor space throughout North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
Besides the amount of capacity that these centers offer CenturyLink's business clients, the company is pursuing Uptime Institute's Management and Operations (M&O) Stamp of Approval on a global basis. The M&O Stamp of Approval is an outcome-based guideline that centers on operational excellence and was developed based on analyzing the root cause of 20 years of outages in high-performance data center.
Over the past two months, the service provider gained M&O Stamp of Approval for three facilities in Singapore and Toronto, while two separate facilities in Chicago and Toronto received Tier III Silver Certification of Operational Sustainability.
CenturyLink's journey with the Uptime Institute began in December 2014 when it announced that it would have 57 of its global data centers evaluated by the Uptime Institute for M&O certification.
What's different about the M&O process is that unlike a "best practices" approach, the M&O process examines why data centers fail and how to minimize, or even eliminate, errors.
Gaining the M&O designation comes at an interesting time for CenturyLink's data center assets.
The service provider, which has been looking at various options for its data center business, said during its fourth quarter earnings call that a number of parties are interested in the data center assets. However, CenturyLink has not made any specific decisions about the assets.
In addition to an outright sale, the telco is considering a number of options for this segment, including retaining some or all of these assets and operations as part of CenturyLink's portfolio.
For more:
- see the release
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