FairPoint unveils wholesale data center services

FairPoint Communications is taking another step to make its name in the booming data center market by launching a set of data center service applications for wholesale reseller and cloud providers that want to establish an instant presence in New England.

The service provider said that it is looking to capitalize on how cloud providers will increasingly turn to third-party data center providers to address their customers' growing adoption of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.

There are a number of uses for a third-party data center.

A satellite data center can help a cloud provider reduce latency and improve performance of application servers by moving compute and storage resources closer to customers and off-loading the primary and secondary data centers. At the same time, a cloud provider or an enterprise can use a third-party data center as part of a disaster recovery strategy.

Another potential advantage of cloud providers that locate in FairPoint's center is the company is the local telco in northern New England, meaning it can also offer complementary offers like fiber Ethernet and wavelength service to key IXC network-to-network interconnection points.

"Cloud providers offering services to customers in the Northeast are turning to FairPoint because we offer a highly reliable and physically secure infrastructure, low-cost power and access to skilled labor," said Chris Alberding, FairPoint vice president of Product Management, in a release. "As the local service provider, FairPoint offers fiber Ethernet and Wavelength Service to key IXC NNIs."

While the main focus is on northern New England, FairPoint also has extended connectivity into Boston and New York City.

FairPoint has been taking an active role in converting former central office sites into new data centers in New Hampshire. The service provider announced in February it opened a new data center facility in Manchester, N.H. FairPoint opened its first data center in Laconia, N.H., in June 2014.

Alberding told FierceTelecom in a previous interview that the telco plans to convert existing central offices into new data centers in both Maine and Vermont, but did not specify when it would begin to carry out those plans.

For more:
- see the release

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