MONROE, La., May 13, 2015 — CenturyLink, Inc. (NYSE: CTL) today announced the opening of a new data center in central Washington, adding hydro-electric-powered data center services to CenturyLink’s hybrid IT services portfolio. The facility offers global enterprises low power costs, and its high resiliency and geographic location make it ideal for cloud and disaster recovery solutions.
The data center, located in Moses Lake, Washington, will ultimately support up to 30 megawatts of IT load on the site, with an initial ramp to 8 megawatts.
“CenturyLink’s new low-cost power data center services provide many benefits to our customers, including a highly resilient solution coupled with power costs and efficiency metrics that rank among the best in the industry, and the facility serves as an excellent disaster recovery location,” said David Meredith, senior vice president, CenturyLink. “Enterprises enjoy global access to CenturyLink’s portfolio of cloud and managed hybrid IT services, and we continue to extend the reach of our data center footprint to new markets to meet from the needs of our customers.”
CenturyLink’s commitment to environmental sustainability continues with the central Washington project. The facility’s electricity is supplied, in part, by hydroelectric generators powered by the nearby Columbia River. The centralWashington climate also allows significant use of free-air cooling, driving some of the lowest power usage effectiveness (PUE) figures in the data center industry.
The central Washington facility offers on-site data center and network services, and includes access to cloud, colocation and managed services available through CenturyLink’s global data center footprint. The site also has a seismic rating of 2B, the lowest rating in the western United States, making it a key location for disaster recovery solutions.
“The central part of Washington state is one of the geographies in which I see substantial potential for further growth as a data center hub,” said Kelly Quinn, research manager with IDC. “Its potential stems from the area’s abundance of natural, power-generating resources, and its relative immunity from natural disasters. The location should help enable CenturyLink’s new data center to provide customers with the ability to achieve higher levels of density without incurring high power costs. It also may offer customers who are ‘green’ conscious the ability to work with a provider that can satisfy their data center needs with renewable energy sources.”
The property is owned by Server Farm Realty and leased to CenturyLink.
The launch of the central Washington data center comes shortly after CenturyLink announced the first deployment of Bloom Energy fuel cells to power a multi-tenant data center, located in southern California. CenturyLink also is the first company to pursue Management & Operations certification from the Uptime Institute at the global portfolio level.
