Time Warner Cable Plans Data Center in Charlotte

TimeWarnerCharlotte

An illustration of plans for a $100 million data center for Time Warner Cable in Charlotte, North Carolina.

North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue is getting plenty of experience unveiling new data center projects. Today Perdue announced that Time Warner Cable will invest $101 million in an expansion of its campus in Charlotte, which will include a 178,000 square foot data center. The project is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2012, but will be designed so that Time Warner Cable can double the size of the data center to accommodate future growth.

“Time Warner Cable looked around the country, and they chose North Carolina,” said Perdue. The project adds to a growing list of data center wins for North Carolina, which includes facilities for Google, Apple, Facebook, Wipro/Infocrossing, American Express and perhaps Walt Disney.

Incentives Helped Clinch Deal

As in the earlier data center projects, North Carolina offers generous incentives to the company - in this case, a state grant from the Job
Development Investment Grant program that could yield $2.9 million in benefits if the company meets its job creation goals. Time Warner Cable (TWC) says its expansion will add 225 new jobs at an average salary of $61,044 a year, although some of those jobs will likely be based at an office building included in the project.

The expansion is part of a broader shift by Time Warner Cable to feature more managed hosting and cloud computing services. Earlier this year TWC bought NaviSite, paying $230 million to acquire a service platform, 10 data centers and 1,200 customers.

Those data centers are apparently not enough. The new Charlotte facility will house 1,600 racks of technical equipment on a 12,000 square foot raised floor. The building offers a virtual cloud environment, allowing for quicker deployment of TWC’s products, which include video, high speed data and commercial services by having storage and network elements in a shared environment.

"The National Data Center allows TWC to focus on delivering services for customers with greater effectiveness and reliability and with less cost and environmental impact," said Jim Ludington, executive vice president of national network operations and engineering, Time Warner Cable. "Opening a data center in Charlotte underscores our commitment to provide the best mix of technology necessary to service our customers."