Located specifically in Avis Farms, a technology park just south of Ann Arbor, the 10,500 square foot facility will house Online Tech's "growing colocation, dedicated server and managed service product lines."

Online Technologies says the new facility is designed for high availability applications and because the data center has dual power generators and redundant uninterruptible power supplies, there is no single point of failure in the power delivered to a customer's equipment.

The network infrastructure also offers similar high availability with two dedicated gigabit fiber connections between the Avis Data Center and Online Technologies' other data centers in downtown Ann Arbor and Flint Township, says the company.

"We take a long term view towards the data center market and see this as an ideal time to bring additional capacity online," says Bob Palmerton, chief financial officer of Online Technologies. "The current economic environment provides us the opportunity to gain significant cost advantages through acquisitions that can last the next decade."

Online Technologies says it has a "unique advantage" with its multiple facilities dispersed across Southeast Michigan. Using a common network infrastructure, three of its data centers are knit together into one "virtual data center," says Online Technologies, giving clients the ability to locate their primary data center in one of the company's sites and their disaster recovery equipment in a another data center separated by 50 miles and different power grids, yet functioning as if they were in the same facility.

In other recent data center news, but on a larger scale, last week software developer Oracle announced it is building a new data center in West Jordan while search engine giant Google reported it has launched a new $600 million data center in Lenoir, North Carolina.