An early-morning power outage earlier this month could have limited 3pL Corp.’s online access to its customers during one of its peak operating times. Instead, the Urbandale-based transportation and logistics management company became the first client to use the Edge Business Continuity Center in Altoona as a backup site until its power was restored.

“As fate would have it, this was our opportunity to test the plan before the contracts were signed,” said Carl Waldenmaier, 3pL’s executive vice president for technology integration. 3pL, which had some emergency generator power, sent 10 employees to the center for a half day. “The advantage was we didn’t have to move equipment,” he said. “We just told them how many people we were sending out.”

LightEdge Solutions Inc. and LBC Technology opened the 10,000-square-foot facility in September 2006. Approximately 40 clients use it for data center space or for backup disaster recovery. Currently about 150 workstations are reserved at the center, which has capacity for 300, said Travis Thompson, the center’s vice president of operations. The $12 million facility was built to withstand 200 mph winds and is equipped with redundant network connections.

Thompson said LightEdge plans to build further data center capacity at the facility within the next four months and will probably begin construction of a second building to be used solely for disaster recovery early next year.