Bluebird Network to expand underground data center in Missouri

Midwest telecommunications company Bluebird Network is expanding its Underground Data Center located in Springfield, Missouri.

The expansion will add more than 11,500 square feet to the data center, bringing its total footprint to more than 29,000 square feet of white space.

Additionally, significant mechanical, electrical and generation capabilities are included, bringing the 85 ft-deep underground data center to full Tier 3 capabilities.

The expansion comes as the company meets the needs of its rapidly growing enterprise and cloud service customer base.

"Bluebird Network is proud to provide this additional data center space and capacity, perfectly aligned with the business and hosting community," says Bluebird Network chief executive officer Michael Morey.

"This data center was purposefully built for the convenience of business communities in the region.  And we are closer than you think to Kansas City, Joplin, Columbia, Northwest Arkansas, and Tulsa.

The data center expansion includes:

• Individual underground concrete building structures to house the UPS, switchgear and paralleling switchgear functions.
• Additional on-site/underground generating capabilities totalling 6MW.
• A 3rd primary metered electrical grid connection.
• Dual UPS systems employing the latest lithium-ion battery technology.
• Full implementation of its Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) platform to continuously monitor all operations.
• 100% diverse critical power path and components from generation to customer power tails.
• Increased fuel storage capacity by more than a factor of 4.

Bluebird says these improvements will allow the company to adapt to industry advancements in cloud computing, the hosting environment, artificial intelligence, and blockchain capabilities.

Some of the customer benefits include measured power usage for cooling and hardware, hot/cold aisle containment, private colocation suites, Level 1 Technical support, and for those larger customers, wholesale kW power rates.

Bluebird's Midwest fiber network, metro fiber build-outs in six Missouri cities, and direct wave services, allows Bluebird to offer attractive data center and network solutions to their customers, the company says.

The Bluebird fiber network has over 151 Points of Presence (POP) sites spanning the Midwest, including the major cities of Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield (MO and IL), Tulsa, Peoria, Rockford, Bloomington, Normal and the Quad Cities.

Bluebird's network now has more than 9,300 fiber route miles of high-speed broadband and fiber-optic connections.

Space in the expanded Springfield data center is available now, with the expansion completion scheduled for mid-2020.