At the beginning of August, IP Pathways announced plans to open an Iowa data center in Urbandale. The structure, set to open by the end of the month, will serve as a computing facility as well as the company’s headquarters.
Overall, the building is 13,800 square feet, 5,000 square feet of which will be dedicated to IP Pathways’s new data center. The rest of the space will be used for computing equipment support and office suites. The facility will be constructed to Carrier Grade Tier 2 standards, allowing for at least 99.741 percent uptime.
Before becoming a data center service provider, IP Pathways was a software and hardware reseller, first founded in 2007. Once the firm began offering data and managed services, however, it established hardware stacks within its computing facilities to support these client-facing offerings. During the transition from reseller to hosting provider, the company benefited from government data center tax incentives, including $37,500 from the Iowa Economic Development Authority.
Although there are currently a number of other Iowa data centers in the region – including Facebook’s Altoona data center and Microsoft’s West Des Moines data center – IP Pathways president CEO Joe Shields said client demands for IT services are high enough to support all the data center activity. In fact, Shields said these large projects have increased the region’s focus on hosted data center services.
“There is as much similarity between those (Facebook’s) data centers and ours as there is between our business models,” Shields said. “And that is non-existent. Customers are asking for these things. It was either do the work or lose their business to other firms.”
The company also operates a Nebraska data center as well as a Kansas data center.
