C Spire Opens Tier III Mississippi Data Center

C Spire has opened a $23 million Mississippi data center. The facility has achieved Tier III Concurrently Maintainable from the Uptime Institute, one of approximately 30 data centers in the U.S. that can say the same. Construction took 12 months from foundation to completion of phase one.

C Spire is a telecommunications company that offers colocation, cloud and hosted exchange services in addition to Internet and wireless. The 24,000-square-foot Mississippi data center is located on a 6.5-acre site at The Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park. The Park is a growing technology hub adjacent to Mississippi State University, the area's largest employer.

The new data center joins two others in Mississippi - one in Ridgeland and the other in downtown Jackson.

C Spire now has a Tier III data center to entice government and businesses in the Southeast. The company claims it is the only commercially-available center of its class within 250 miles. That claim isn’t completely outlandish, as it's one of around 30 with the Tier III certification in the U.S. and there hasn’t been much data center activity in Mississippi. Local officials in Starkville and Oktibbeha County provided tax incentives to support the project and hopefully bring in more data centers.

Starkville is considered an anchor of the Golden Triangle region in northeast Mississippi, along with Columbus and West Point. The facility’s Tier III certification means it might appeal to the sizable federal presence in the area. Mississippi is (or was, depending on consolidation efforts) home to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security disaster recovery data center, and a Navy DOD Supercomputing Resource Center (Navy DSRC).

The data center is also located in a low-risk geographic zone.

“Our center is purpose-built with world-class solutions for the complex data, storage and cloud service needs of our customers,” said Brian Caraway, senior vice president of Enterprise Markets for C Spire. The center is built to withstand the most extreme weather conditions and natural disasters and is located in one of the lowest composite geo-risk zones in Mississippi. “Our customers can rest easy knowing their data is safe and secure and that business continuity is safeguarded.”