C Spire plans to build a $20 million data center in northeast Mississippi to support cloud services for enterprise customers.
The 22,400-square-foot center will be built on a 6.5 acre site in Starkville, Miss., at the Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park. in Starkville, Mississippi. C Spire plans to break ground next month and complete the first phase of construction by November 2014, when the center can take on its first customers.
C Spire said that when the new data center opens, it will be one of 52 in the U.S. with a Tier 3 or 4 rating, the highest data center certification of the Upstream Institute, which sets standards for rating and certifying data centers. Most similar data centers have little or no space for commercial use, and the new center will be the only one of its class and capability within 250 miles of Starkville, the carrier added.
“This level of computing power has never before been so readily available to businesses in this region,” said Kevin Hankins, C Spire’s COO.
Along with enterprise cloud services, C Spire also intends to offer services at the site that include co-location, managed hosting, computing, storage, disaster recovery, network and connectivity, sold through the company’s C Spire Business Solutions division.
“Now, more than ever before, businesses need to intelligently manage their data and critical operational processes to handle the explosive growth of mobile, Internet and corporate-based data demands through cloud-based solutions,” Hankins added, citing recent trends that show data center IP traffic is continuing to grow at an annual rate of 31 percent. “Business is not going to the cloud. Business has gone to the cloud.”
C Spire noted that the center’s location is in a low-risk geographic zone, and that it has direct access to C Spire’s fiber network. The new data center will be C Spire’s third in Mississippi; it operates two other centers in downtown Jackson and in Ridgeland.
