Expedient announced Wednesday that it will be opening a 32,000-square-foot, 2.5-megawatt data center in Centennial, Colorado, to meet increasing customer demand in the western U.S.
This is Expedient’s 14th data center in the U.S. The data center has the capacity to support up to 31,000 physical servers.
The facility begins operations on Wednesday and will be able to continue operations as the company makes significant upgrades over the next six months.
Bryan Smith, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Expedient, said Expedient is popular with companies that store most of their data in a large, hyperscale data center, like AWS or Azure, but also need to store data elsewhere.
“The hybrid model or distributed cloud is becoming more prevalent. You get 15 to 20 percent of your applications that work really well in a hyperscaler, like an AWS or Azure, but the remainder don’t fit so well,” he told Built In. “That’s what we do really well, is working in conjunction with the hyperscale clouds.”
Smith said Expedient will also have a local cloud availability zone, which he said is not common in Denver.
“[Amazon Web Services], Azure and Google are all taking you outside of Denver to actually have compute resources,” he said. “We will have the ability for clients to have both their physical computing environments in the exact same building as their cloud resources.”
Expedient plans to hire 15 to 20 people to run the data center. The company is also hiring for 75 corporate level positions, about 80 percent of which will be technical roles such as network engineer or solution architect.
“Because we have the facility [in Denver], we also make it one of the target markets for hiring as a whole,” Smith said.
Because Denver is at relatively low risk for natural disasters, the data center will house data from large clients who use Expedient’s disaster recovery service. Expedient is also partnering with local companies, such as Morpheus Data.
“Expedient and Morpheus help enterprises nationwide unify hybrid cloud operations and accelerate application modernization projects,” Morpheus Data CMO Brad Parks said in a statement. “Their operational expertise coupled with our software platform is a force multiplier for IT teams. We’re excited to have them expand into our backyard here in Denver and add their voice to an already strong tech sector.”
