The following is a summary of recent news on investments, buys, and builds of data centers in California:
- TeliaSonera Chooses CoreSite’s Los Angeles Data Center Product for Its Gaming Service. The decision was based on CoreSite’s flexibility, scalability, and local customer base of more than 200 companies, including an established gaming, media, and entertainment ecosystem. CoreSite manages 600,000 square feet in Los Angeles, including 437,000 square feet of operating data center space and Southern California’s most network-dense data center. In addition to its operating data center space, CoreSite owns approximately 145,000 square feet of space targeted for additional data center development, including 25,000 SF planned for completion in the third quarter of 2011.
- Server Farm Realty completes construction of a new Silicon Valley data center. The 26,900-sq-ft facility in Santa Clara, California, brings 13,000 sq ft of data center space to the region’s market. Sitting on a meeting line of two tectonic plates, Silicon Valley and the surrounding region are in a seismically active zone. “As we’ve seen with recent world events, disaster preparedness and the ability to remain operational are of the utmost importance,†CEO Avner Papouchado said. “From building redundant water supplies with a backup tank to outfitting the building’s infrastructure to meet a seismic 1.5 importance factor, every design detail safeguards our customers’ data in an earthquake-prone region.†The 1.5 seismic importance factor is a requirement for hospitals and emergency-services buildings. Titan – a 136,000-sq-ft repurposed former missile-control center of the US military in Moses Lake, Washington – was SFR’s first data center, and the company is also in the process of outfitting a five-story data center in Chicago that will be focused on serving the electronic-trading industry.
- Internap announced that its Santa Clara colocation facility has achieved Green Globes® certification, following a rigorous review process by the Green Buildings Initiative (GBI). This marks the first Green Globes certification of a public data center in the U.S. as well as the first non-governmental building in California. A green building guidance and assessment program, Green Globes helps commercial building owners advance environmental performance and sustainability. Internap’s Santa Clara data center received the Green Globes “New Construction” certification, which evaluates, quantifies and improves the environmental performance of both new construction and major renovation projects. Internap adhered to standards related to consuming fewer fossil fuels, reducing greenhouse emissions, conserving water, reducing other forms of pollution, minimizing impact on the land surrounding the building and offering a better working environment for occupants. “Internap’s Santa Clara data center highlights the success that is possible in the design and construction of an environmentally sustainable commercial building,” said Joe Pinelli, vice president and general manager of Green Globes at GBI. “The unique requirements of data centers – specifically the tremendous energy usage – typically make them a difficult fit for sustainability programs, but this project achieved excellent results and was a shining example of how to attack that problem. Internap’s team should be proud of the manner in which it approached the overall design and construction for efficient use of energy and resources, a healthy environment for its employees and fiscal prudence for the company itself.”
- SMTP, Inc., a provider of email delivery services for permission-based marketing and transactional email, announced it has opened a new state-of-the-art data center designed specifically to increase the service reliability and performance of its cloud-based email delivery services. SMTP is locating its new data center at the Hurricane Electric facility in Fremont, California, with alternative direct routing over the XO Communications fiber network, and relying on CISCO and Dell as the primary router and server vendors. “The advent of email based behavioral commerce systems continues to drive massive increases in the amount of email,” commented Semyon Dukach, CEO of SMTP. Deliverability and service improvements are critical and drove SMTP’s decision to embark on our own state of the art data center. Previously, SMTP employed a server infrastructure strategy that relied upon contracting managed servers at many of the leading hosting providers including Rackspace and SoftLayer. This initial strategy of distributing its server infrastructure over several hosting providers was designed to reduce service outage risk and improve availability of IP addresses, while enabling variety for deploying servers specific to customer service quality needs. However, due to significant growth in its customer base and higher service level demands, SMTP has shifted its strategy to establish its own data centers for greater volumes, flexibility, and ease of management.
- One week after GE Appliances said it has earned a LEED Platinum designation for its new data center facility in Kentucky, a wholesale data center operator from California has announced its own LEED Platinum rating. Vantage Data Centers, based in Santa Clara, Calif., has achieved the award for its V3 building, which is a 6-megawatt, 60,000 square-foot facility. Two other sites on the property are registered under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. If the other two buildings are certified at the Platinum level, the site would become the world’s largest LEED Platinum data center campus — with 300,000 square feet of space that run off a 50-megawatt dedicated substation.
- Zayo Fiber Solutions announced that it is building a fiber network in Los Angeles for CoreSite. To be completed by 2011, this deployment will extend Zayo’s footprint beyond it’s existing markets of Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Boise, Spokane, and Denver. Zayo’s President Matt Erickson said, “Zayo’s support of CoreSite’s Los Angeles data centers gives us a network expansion into a major tier one market. We view Los Angeles as a key Zayo growth market, and will be expanding this foundational network in support of other customer opportunities.†CoreSite’s data center is about 600,000 square feet spread across two data centers.
- NTT America soon will be able to claim a data center that runs on biogas. The Japanese telecommunications company will install five Bloom Energy fuel cells in its California data center that will use biogas as a fuel. It’s a sign of the growing interest in cleaner fuel cell technology, which proponents say will increasingly be adapted for residential customers. The fuel cells will generate 500 kilowatts of power, which is enough for about 500 U.S. homes. At the data center, they will generate 4.2 million kilowatt-hours per year and reduce NTT America’s carbon dioxide emissions by 1.6 million pounds.
For More Information, see California Data Center.
