(Newswire.net — June 24, 2013) Alexandria, MN — Vaultas, LLC, a provider of colocation and business continuity/disaster recovery services, disclosed the expansion of its Midwest data center network and datacenter located in rural Alexandria, Minnesota, located about halfway between Minneapolis and Fargo, North Dakota (approximately 130 miles from Minneapolis and 107 miles from Fargo). The Alexandria datacenter serves as a business continuity and disaster recovery site for businesses in and between the two cities.
Vaultas’ Alexandria datacenter is on the company’s self-built fiber-optic network that runs from Minneapolis to Fargo, providing affordable, large-scale bandwidth to rural Minnesota. The site is vendor-neutral and supports multi-carriers through its 100 Gigabit fiber-optic connection to the 511 Carrier Hotel in Minneapolis. The facility boasts dual-UPS power, 3,500 square feet of available capacity and 24x7x365 security and support. In addition, the facility operates on a new 2,000-amp power feed from twin sub-station power loops, and is backed up with 48 hours from a diesel generator. The cooling plan includes in-row cooling on a case-by-case basis.
About Minneapolis and Fargo
Minneapolis is one of North America’s emerging datacenter markets. It is home to nine Fortune 500 companies including UnitedHealth Group, Target Corp, General Mills and Ameriprise Financial. The Minneapolis metro is ranked 14th in a list of the top metro areas in the US by GDP, and is home to several multi-tenant datacenter providers like SunGard, TDS Telecommunications and zColo. The area continues to grow as a disaster recovery location.
Fargo is a smaller market, although continuing to grow. The area was previously based in agriculture, but is growing in the food processing, manufacturing, technology, retail trade, higher education and healthcare industries. Large companies of the area include Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, Bobcat Co, Microsoft and Swanson Health Products. Forbes has ranked Fargo as the 7th best small city in which to start a business. The area continues to see over 15% population growth decade after decade and an increase in business operations each year. The Fargo market has only a few small colocation facilities.
According to T1R, Vaultas has chosen an unlikely, but strategic, location in a rural area to enable the company to provide enterprises from both Minneapolis and Fargo with disaster recovery and colocation services. With the company’s disaster recovery focus, T1R believes the new facility will find its disaster recovery niche to compete with the larger datacenter providers in Minneapolis as well as small providers in Fargo due to its location approximately halfway between the two cities.
The Fargo area historically was an agricultural area but is now seeing large amounts of growth in many sectors, Vaultas’ data center being one of them, providing opportunity for Vaultas. Vaultas has placed itself in an interesting position to be a first provider targeting both markets (Fargo and the much larger Minneapolis market) with necessary disaster recovery services for SMBs and larger enterprises.
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If you’d like more information, including introductory special offers, call Vaultas, LLC at (877) 679-9939 or visit http://vaultasusa.com.
About The Author: Jeff Martin is a senior partner at NuaVista Consulting, Inc., based in St. Paul, MN. Follow him at Google+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/112570942863636743067