PAETEC Will Open Northern Virginia Data Center

ISP and hosting provider PAETEC Holding Corp. (PAET) will convert an existing building in McLean, Virginia into a new data center facility to serve its hosting and colocation services, the company said today. The three-story, 62,500 square foot existing facility will be converted into data center space over the next seven months, yielding 49,000 square feet of raised floor space.

The PAETEC facility in McLean, which is planned to open at the end of 2011, is the latest in a series of announcements of new data center supply for the northern Virginia market, which is one of the most active in the country. CoreSite and Latisys are each building out new data center space, and this week both Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros said they had purchased additional property in Ashburn to support more data centers.

"We selected this location specifically to meet the growing needs of the mid-Atlantic businesses as well as to support government applications," said Sanjay Hiranandani, PAETEC’s chief technology officer. "We expect this data center to be considered one of the premier centers on the East Coast. Additionally, our fiber and fixed wireless infrastructure ensure that we can deliver the cloud-based services to end users virtually anywhere in the country at Gigabit and higher speeds."

The center continues PAETEC’s ongoing geographic expansion of its data center network. With the addition of McLean, PAETEC will have key data center facilities in Andover, Mass.; Bethlehem and Conshohocken, Pa.; Milwaukee, Houston, Phoenix, and Richmond, Va., augmenting its footprint of more than 100 physical colocation facilities nationwide. PAETEC says it operates 1.4 million square feet of data center space.