A Retailer’s Community-Centered Data Center Vision
Foresight that Anticipated Eastern PA's Tech Growth
The end of September is bittersweet for those of us at DirectLTx. We look forward to enjoying the foliage on weekend drives into the beautiful Eastern Pennsylvania countryside along with the requisite stops to purchase some of the delicious bounty from the Amish-run produce stands that pop up at every rural crossroads. But it also reminds us of our founder, Albert Boscov, who would have turned 97 this week. With all the current controversy over mega-data center projects, it’s easy to forget that there’s another side to the data center world, that of community-based providers like Direct LTx.
Our company is made up of local professionals with a two-decade history of serving Eastern Pennsylvania enterprises, SMBs, startups, and government agencies, like the county 911 and Emergency Management Services that operate from our building. A local hospital provides technology training to staff over all three shifts on the office side of our complex. Some of the applications they use at both work and at home are housed on the other side of the complex in the Direct LTx data center, which is securely separated by 24-hour security with a multi-ring layer of protection, access control, and video monitoring.
A Local Initiative: Twenty years ago, our founder Albert Boscov recognized the great potential a data center can provide for community services as well as jobs. Albert did not want the digital age to pass his beloved city of Reading by. Although he was initially interested in the facility to house the infrastructure for his growing retail empire, he also wanted other companies in our region to have a local infrastructure option. He also knew that the value would lie beyond Reading companies, that many Philadelphia enterprises needed a data center that was separated from their office by a few dozen miles for their IT operations for the purposes of security, safety, redundancy, or disaster recovery.
Albert saw data center services as not just a business, but a public service as well. So, he took some of the wealth he built from a career growing the Boscov’s department store chain and invested it in a vacant utility company’s granite rock of a data center that had been originally built in 1985. He named the company DirectLink, which evolved into Direct LTx. He updated the data center to state-of-the-art standards in the hope that it would both encourage the Reading area tech-ecosystem as well as be a viable business. He has been proven correct on both counts.
A Vision Fulfilled: We’re proud to operate a world class data center with a local touch, helping Eastern Pennsylvania organizations thrive in a highly redundant home for their infrastructure, multiple interconnection options, including direct cloud connections, and an experienced team of data center pros that can help them meet their business goals.
We’re here around the clock to serve the several dozen enterprises, startups, service providers, and SMBs that call Philadelphia and all of Eastern Pennsylvania home. If you’d like a tour of the Direct LTx data center email us at strategy@DirectLTx.com. We’d love to show you the fulfillment of Albert Boscov’s vision.