Keystone NAP Taps into Fiber Networks from Sunesys and Comcast Business

Putting the finishing touches on a new data center facility located in the Philadelphia area, Keystone NAP this week announced that its hosting facility is now connected to fiber optic networks from Sunesys and Comcast Business.

Shawn Carey, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Keystone NAP, said the deals will give IT organizations that make use of the company’s hosting services access to a major concentration of fiber optic networks running up and down the Amtrack rail corridor that are only a few miles from the company’s data center located in Fairless Hills, Penn.

Keystone NAP, said Carey, decided to build a data center at that location because an electric grid existed that was originally built for steel mills that operated in the region. With access to an abundance of power, Keystone NAP then lined up investors to acquire a 1,600-acre compound next to electric grid.

Since then, KeyStone NAP has been building out a data center facility that makes use of private modulars or stackable data center vaults called KeyBlocks. Each KeyBlock comes with a custom, redundant, conditioned, uninterruptible power ranging from 100kW all the way up to 400kW per KeyBlock.

While that data center can serve the needs of IT organizations located almost anywhere in the Northeast, Carey noted that there are a lot of aging data center facilities in the Philadelphia region that experience frequent outages because of the legacy technologies installed in those data centers. Rather than invest capital to upgrade those facilities Keystone NAP is betting that many of those organizations will opt to treat IT infrastructure going forward as an operating expense.

“There’s been a lot of outages in Philadelphia that have cost businesses a lot of money,” said Carey. “A lot of IT organizations don’t have the ability to keep up with the services demands of their organizations.”

While competition for that business is naturally fierce, Carey said the number of modern data centers in the region is relatively small. The benefit to being in the Northeast is that the Fairless Hills facility is close to major networking hubs and sits on the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. That makes it relatively easy for IT staffs to visit whenever the need arises.

Next up, Carey said Keystone NAP will leverage its relationships with Sunesys, Comcast Business and other providers of fiber optic networks to provide customers with a managed set of network services that will span everything from the design of the network to its ongoing management delivered via the data center in Fairless Hills, Penn.

The degree to which IT organizations will actually migrate more aggressively towards more reliance on hosting services naturally remains to be seen. The one thing that is for certain is that given all the competition for capital within most organizations there’s certainly more interest in treating IT as an operating expense than ever.