Yesterday in the Denver suburb of Centennial, Time Warner Cable broke ground on expanding its National Data Center West facility.

The expansion comes with a price tag of $85 million and the revamped data center is slated to go live in January of 2015. Time Warner Cable opened its National Data Center East in Charlotte, North Carolina last year. 

With the expansion, the facility in Centennial will add 75 percent more capacity, which will twin its capabilities with National Data Center East.

Adding in previous upgrades that were made in the Centennial facility starting in 2011, the total investment in National Data Center West will top $141 million once it’s finished.

“Every day we serve millions of customers across 29 states from Hawaii to Maine, and expansion of National Data Center West reaffirms our commitment to deliver an expanding array of products, services and content to our customers anywhere, any time and on any device,” said Mike LaJoie, executive vice president and chief technology officer, Time Warner Cable.

The two data centers are at the core Time Warner Cable’s digital video and IP-based services. Some of the primary functions of both data centers include hosting the applications that support approximately 70 million residential emails sent per day, managing the billing records of more than 15 million customers and supporting backend applications delivered to Time Warner Cable employees.

The centers also support core residential and commercial products and services including Wi-Fi, high-speed data, voice, TV services on smart phones, and Time Warner Cable’s IntelligentHome home management offering.

“Our two National Data Centers serve as backups to one another to provide our residential and business customers with continuously available services, even in times of a major disruption,” said Jim Ludington, senior vice president of technology business operations, Time Warner Cable. “We’re excited to be extending and enhancing our data center here and expanding our operations in this area.”

When the project is completed,  the National Data Center West will be a 170,000-square -foot facility that includes 1,600 racks of technical equipment and can support 6400 kilowatts (kW) of critical load.

Time Warner Cable is working on garnering Silver LEED certification by achieving best-practice design in the categories of site, water, energy, material use, and environmental quality.

Time Warner Cable said the Denver area was a top choice for the data center due in part to the dry, cool air that will be utilized to naturally control temperatures in the facility a vast majority of the time, which will cut down on energy usage.

Denver, which was once known as the cable capital of the nation, is also centrally located and well suited for satelilite farms. The Comcast Media  Center is also located in the Denver area.

Time Warner Cable said there were currently 70 employees located within the current facility in Denver. Once the expansion project is completed, Time Warner Cable will add 25 percent more engineering and data center services resources so that the facility will be staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

During the construction project over a 36-month period, the company is on track to employ approximately 400 jobs including all trades, equating to more than $11 million in generated local income.