Online Technologies Corporation has announced the opening of its newest datacenter in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The 10,500 square foot datacenter is located in Avis Farms, a technology park south of Ann Arbor. The Avis datacenter will house its growing colocation, dedicated server and managed service product lines sold to small and mid-sized businesses in Michigan and the Great Lakes region.
The new datacenter is designed for high availability applications that need to be always-on and always connected to the Internet. Customers can select redundant power and network options to their computer systems. Because the datacenter has dual power generators and redundant uninterruptable power supplies (UPS), there is no single point of failure in the power delivered to a customer's equipment.
The network infrastructure offers similar high availability with two dedicated gigabit fiber connections between the Avis datacenter and Online Technologies' other datacenters in downtown Ann Arbor and Flint Township. The network has a redundant Cisco network architecture and is connected to multiple Tier1 Internet suppliers. Built-in failover across the network and Internet providers eliminates any single point of failure in the Internet delivery. With the addition of its third corporate-owned datacenter, Online Technologies has a unique advantage with its multiple datacenters dispersed across Southeast Michigan.
With a common network infrastructure, the three datacenters are knit together into one "virtual datacenter." This gives clients the ability to locate their primary datacenter in one of Online Technologies' sites and their disaster recovery equipment in a separate datacenter separated by 50 miles and different power grids, yet function as if they were in the same datacenter.
"We take a long term view towards the datacenter market and see this as an ideal time to bring additional capacity online. The current economic environment provides us the opportunity to gain significant cost advantages through acquisitions that can last the next decade" said Bob Palmerton, chief financial officer.
Online Technologies operations include datacenters in downtown Ann Arbor in Flint Township. With addition of the Avis datacenter, Online Technologies has grown from a single 800 square foot datacenter in 2003 to four datacenters with a combined total of more than 40,000 square feet. OTC also leases datacenter space from a partner in Southfield for its clients requiring service closer to the Detroit area.