Sometimes, important changes happen without anyone noticing. That was the case recently as Red Level greatly expanded our West Michigan datacenter footprint.

We’ve been watching closely as the Grand Rapids-area market has grown and changed in recent years. Grand Rapids has been emerging as a powerful new hub for information technology-focused companies, both in the form of innovative start-ups and as a destination of choice for established companies looking to expand into a new market or relocate their operations. At the same time, a lot of the area’s established businesses have been embracing cloud-based solutions as a means of building their capabilities and modernizing their IT operations.

Naturally, as the markets we serve and our clients’ needs grow, we need to grow as well. The time was right for us to make a sizeable, forward-looking investment in our capacity on the western side of our state. We effectively doubled our datacenter capacity in Grand Rapids, paving the way for the expanded services and advanced solutions that our clients will need in the coming years.

As a result of this expansion, we’ll be able to provide our DRaaS and BaaS to clients with large on-premise IT environments. Better still, by implementing multi-cloud redundancy, clients will be able to replicate both to Red Level’s Mi-CLOUD environment and Azure for added redundancy and data security.

Perhaps surprisingly, this expansion benefits some of our clients on the east side of the state as well. We’ve migrated our DRaaS and BaaS servers to Grand Rapids from our production datacenter in Southfield, creating geographical separation between the services and placing DRaaS/ BaaS on a different segment of the power grid. This means that in the event of a massive regional power outage such as the one we experienced in the early 2000s, our disaster recovery, and backup services would remain accessible and functional.

The upshot of our Grand Rapids enhancements is that clients with georedundant services in their contracts are getting an added measure of protection. Red Level gets more room and opportunity to grow, expanding our capacity and the services we can offer to clients. And the Grand Rapids area business community gains improved access to Red Level’s high-performance DRaaS and BaaS services.

Nobody may have noticed the difference our expanded West Michigan datacenter makes – yet. You can be certain, though, that it’s a big one: Added capacity and added reach for Red Level translates to added value for our customers, as we gain the ability to improve our existing services and prepare to add new ones. This addition will translate into more flexibility, more choices, more power and more protection for all of our clients, and exciting new frontiers for Red Level. That’s growth that benefits us all.