Datacenter Bytes 2/23: AT&T, Apple, First, IO, Phoenix NAP

A pair of giant new data center buildouts feature in this week’s news from the world of colocation and the cloud:

AT&T (NYSE:T, news, filings) is joining the growing colocation party in western North Carolina. They announced yesterday their intention to spend more than $200M in constructing a data center in Kings Mountain. The project will bring 1000 jobs to the region during the construction phase, and then more than 100 once the facility opens in 2014. AT&T joins others who have joined the growing cluster of cloud infrastructure in the region, including Apple in Maiden and Google in Lenoir.

Speaking of Apple, they just picked the location of a new data center designed to complement that 500K square foot North Carolina facility. They recently bought 160 acres of land in Prineville, Oregon for $5.6M, on which they will build a ‘green’ facility. If Prineville sounds familiar, that’s because Facebook is already there in a big way.

First Communications has formally announced its new status as an AWS Direct Connect partner. They will be providing direct connectivity to Amazon’s AWS location in Equinix Ashburn, leveraging their Midwest and MidAtlantic fiber footprint. Of course, this won’t be news to regular readers here, as I noted that First was already listed as a partner on Amazon’s site a few weeks ago.

IO won a contract with St.Mary’s Food Bank Alliance, which will use the company’s DCaaS services at its flagship IO Phoenix facility. You know the cloud is here when even a non-profit foot bank needs its own modular data center assets in place.

And speaking of Phoenix, Phoenix NAP also picked up a couple of contracts this week. The IT consulting firm Unicom is expanding their footprint in the data center in order to support growing demand from higher education for its hosted services. Meanwhile, systems integrator Blue Box Systems has decided to move into the facility as part of its efforts to move it and its customers further into the cloud.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Datacenter