tw telecom expands its Minnesota colocation bandwidth

Overall, the service provider has two colocation centers in the Twin Cities area with almost 100,000 square feet of space.

Already used by a number of its area clients, tw telecom will hold a presentation at the Minnetonka location called Leveraging Co-location for Next Gen IT and Cloud Strategies as a way to illustrate its investment strategy in the Minnesota market.

The Minnetonka center is used by area businesses for a number of key applications, including disaster recovery and business continuity, Internet site hosting, and augmenting or replacing existing data center assets.

Virtual Radiologic, one of the largest U.S.-based radiology practices, said the facility enables it to be more responsive to the 20,000 radiological procedures per day that it processes, with most radiological exams completed in less than 20 minutes and emergency cases in five to six minutes.

While tw telecom has built out a number of colocation facilities, the service provider has approached the market a bit differently than other service providers, choosing to grow and invest in its own existing facilities versus making a number of acquisitions.

Outside of operating its own data centers, the service provider also continues to provide fiber to other data center-centric service providers such as Core NAP to help them expand their respective service reach.  

To date, tw telecom has fiber connections to 350 third-party data centers. Larissa Herda, tw telecom's CEO and chairman, said during the Deutsche Bank 2012 Media & Telecom Conference in March that its presence in these data centers is actually helping those providers attract more customers while simultaneously offering its own customers more data center options.