Modular data center specialist IO on Wednesday landed a strategic agreement with CenturyLink’s newly formed Technology Solutions group, which was until recently known as Savvis, to lay the groundwork for the telecommunications provider’s colocation and hosting rollout in Arizona.

As part of the deal, CenturyLink is setting up shop in IO’s mammoth Phoenix facility and its nearby Scottsdale data center, with more locations to come. The move extends the firm’s  already massive presence in Phoenix, where it maintains a substantial network services business and employs more than 1,700 workers.

“CenturyLink continues to invest in expanding our global data center footprint into key markets like Phoenix and extending our hosting capabilities through new technologies like IO’s Intelligent Control platform,” noted Jeff Von Deylen, the president of CenturyLink Technology Solutions. Besides Savvis, the division also includes cloud provider Tier3 and development service AppFog, two of the company’s other recent acquisitions.

CenturyLink plans to make as much as nine megawatts of additional capacity available to clients using IO’s data center container solutions, which can be deployed one rack at a time and come pre-built with power supplies and cooling systems. The modules ship with IO.OS, an integrated operating system that provides centralized management, monitoring and analytics capabilities in order to decouple the control plane from the underlying hardware, simplifying administration.

“By standardizing that delivery footprint, and manufacturing the standardized interface for that physical data center, we were able to coordinate that into an operating system called the IO OS, which brings all of the attributes that VMware or a virtualization platform delivers at the server level, and delivers that at the individual server level,” IO CEO and product architect George Slessman detailed in an August interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE.

The company expanded its vision for out-of-the-box IT at this week’s Open Compute Project Summit with a new OpenStack-powered cloud platform that runs on Facebook-designed Winterfell and Knox servers. Customers can host the solution in one of IO’s colocation facilities or deploy their very own Open Compute stack on-premise.

See Slessman’s entire segment on IO below:

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