Colorado Data Center Opening Marks Fifth For ViaWest

ViaWest recently announced that its fifth Colorado data center in the Denver area is now formally open.

The construction project was first revealed in October 2013 and the company expressed its intentions to seek a certification from the Uptime Institute, which it is currently in the process of doing. ViaWest’s Las Vegas data center received Tier IV design certification, making the company the first colocation provider to achieve such a distinction.

ViaWest built the Colorado data center from the ground up because they felt they couldn’t find a facility in the area that suited their needs. The construction cost $208 million and includes expansion ability for the future. The 18 megawatt data center is located in Denver suburb of Englewood and was based on the same design as the Lone Mountain Nevada data center, only at twice the scale.

“The biggest differentiator across the entire data center fleet is that it’s our first purpose?-built data center,” said Todd Gale, vice president of data center architecture and innovation at ViaWest. “It was our first greenfield project. It was an excellent experience and will be our model going forward in the near term, We have two expansions in planning stages in existing markets that will be purpose built as well.”

The new Compark facility in Colorado features 210,000 square feet of space with 140,000 square feet of raised floor and is the provider’s first greenfield construction project. The data center utilizes high density pods of more than 700 watts per square foot and boasts a projected power usage effectiveness rating of 1.2.

ViaWest’s customer investment in IT equipment for the new facility is between $500 million and $1 billion, and the company says it could possibly invest $316 million into the facility over the course of the next seven years. With four other Colorado data centers in the area, ViaWest said they chose to make such a large investment in their capacity there due to the high levels of demand they’d experienced.