One of them is Equinix (EQIX), which acquired the downtown Atlanta data center as part of its 2010 acquisition of Switch and Data. Equinix cited Atlanta as one of the markets where it could benefit from undeveloped space in the Switch & Data data center portfolio. Level 3 also operates data center space in the building.

180 Peachtree is an 8-story, 658,000 square foot building built in 1927. The building was bought in 2000 by Taconic Investment Partners, which invested $24 million to adapt the facility’s upper floors for telecom and data centers use. Taconic sold the building in March 2007 to Peachtree Carnegie LLC, which then leased the former Macy’s space on the lower three floors to 180 Peachtree Retail Group, a partnership of Atlanta investors.

Carter Validus is based in Tampa and headed by John Carter, a veteran real estate investor and principal of Carter & Associates. Data centers are part of a broader strategy in which Carter Validus hopes to take advantage of opportunities created by health care reform and its pending impact on medical real estate and IT infrastructure.

In May, the company acquired its first property, a fully-leased 20,000 square foot data center in Richardson, Texas.

The exterior of the QTS Metro Atlanta data center.

With 990,000 square feet of total enclosed space, the QTS Atlanta Metro Data Center is one of the world’s largest data centers, with its own on-site Georgia Power substation. The site is currently in the third phase of a multi-year expansion that will more than double its original 200,000 square feet of raised floor space. This video from QTS (Quality Technology Services) provides a look inside the huge facility and the infrastructure that keeps it humming.

For more on QTS, see our QTS (Quality Technology Services) Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

For more on energy efficiency, see our Green Data Centers Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

55 Marietta Street, formerly the Fulton National Bank Building, is a 21-story, 399,000 square foot building, with about 180,000 square feet of space occupied by technology companies, including 16 carriers and several colocation and managed services providers.

New Meet-Me-Room

The redevelopment will convert the remaining 10 floors (just over 200,000 square feet) into high-density wholesale colocation space. The first ohase of Westplan’s redevelopment will focus creating a new Meet-Me-Room and fiber optic backbone to build carrier-to-carrier and carrier-to-tenant traffic exchange and cross connections.

Phase two will add more than 20 megawatts of electrical capacity, a central generator plant and central cooling system. Tenant suites will be available as commissioned rack space with options from 100 watts per square foot to 200 watts a square foot. Westplan can also make suites available in powered shell condition for customers who prefer to design and build out their own space.

Ken Baudry and Mike Warren with Grubb & Ellis Company’s National Data Center Practice Group will assist in the redevelopment and leasing effort.

Westplan Investors has been involved in more than $1.5 billion in investments the Southern United States. The company currently owns properties in the Atlanta, Raleigh, Jacksonville, Tampa, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Phoenix markets.

“We will be consolidating the capacity from some (of) our smaller data centers in North America into a bigger state-of-the-art facility, which allows us to take advantage of the latest technology and achieve efficiencies of scale,” AMD spokeswoman Pushpita Prasad told the Atlanta Business Chronicle (registration required).

Suwanee is already home to at least two major data centers, including a 350,000 square foot facility operated by QTS (Quality Technology Services) and a major data center hub for HP.

Many data center professionals are concerned that the cloud doesn’t necessarily give them the security and control they want. In addition, they know that with application growth, demand for data center space has to grow as well. Yet they don’t see the matching supply of suitable space and power that provides the scalability and flexibility they know they are going to need in the future. Their concerns focus on where is all the necessary IT infrastructure is going to go?

This paper looks at many key data center trends like cloud computing and other complex hosting and colocation strategies. It also provides valuable insights on how to build a plan for a scalable and flexible data center strategy. Click here to download this white paper.

A diagram of how the QTS PowerFlex program allows customers to scale capacity up and down over time (click for larger image).

The process of leasing data center space is all about the kilowatts and megawatts. Data center service provider QTS  (Quality Technology Services) today announced several innovative programs to help customers manage their power bills.

The PowerBank and PowerFlex programs allow large customers to either reduce their power capacity, or to scale their available power up and down as their requirements change. The programs are designed to provide financial  flexibility for large enterprises and service providers who sign contracts to purchase between 500 kilowatts and 5 megawatts of power.

Buying wholesale data center space typically involves a long-term lease with commitments to power and space that can’t be modified during the contract period. If a customer’s requirements change and it needs less power than expected, the company could wind up paying for space and power that it may never use.

Addresses Capacity Forecasting Risks

PowerBank offers clients the opportunity to sign a contract for large amounts of power and space, but retain the option to scale back their footprint if their business changes – effectively reducing the risk in forecasting long-term power and space requirements.

“PowerBank, will revolutionize the way clients purchase data center services” said Tesh Durvasula, Chief Marketing and Business Officer at QTS.

PowerFlex offers an additional option – the ability to temporarily scale power usage up and down as needed within a 500 kilowatt range.”PowerFlex is a direct result of customers looking for creative ways to manage the power requirements,” said Durvasula. “With PowerBank and PowerFlex, clients can effectively manage and align power needs with business needs.”

An example: a global consulting client recently chose QTS for a custom data center solution in which the customer can manage its power requirement increases in existing space from 500 kilowatts to 2 megawatts during the contract term. The customer also has the ability to reduce power requirements, if necessary, allowing it to scale its footprint up to support new applications and development initiatives, or scale down if it reduces its space requirements through a consolidation or equipment refresh.

Flexible Footprints Make it Work

“Given the size and scope of our data centers, QTS can quickly and easily accommodate our clients need to expand or reduce their footprint,” said Durvasula. “If you need to give it back to us, that’s fine, because we can redistribute this to other clients.”

That’s a function of QTS’ facilities and business model. The company operates enormous data centers in Atlanta and Richmond, which house between 900,000 and 1.2 million square feet of space. This gives the company unusual flexibility in how it partitions its data center space within these huge buildings. QTS also offers a range of services that includes wholesale data centers, colocation and managed hosting and cloud services.

“I can move walls around very differently, because my floor plates are 100,000 square feet,” said Durvasula. “PowerFlex space may not always be contiguous, but it would be in the same building. I can be flexible. If someone using PowerFlex scales down and leaves me with a space of 500 kilowatts (about 3,300 square feet), I can wall it off, put (colocation) cages in there and have a nice day. Because we have flexibility in footprint and product offering, we can pass that flexibility on to our customers.”

Durvasula said PowerBank and PowerFlex are responses to customers who are seeking new ways to manage their data center requirements, and looking to providers for innovative solutions.

“We believe strongly that this industry is about who can service customers better,” he said. “There is a sophisticated customer out there that is forcing us to be nuanced in our pricing.”

“We have experienced explosive growth in cloud services as enterprises have realized benefits with cloud-based infrastructures, and we are expanding our footprint in Atlanta to support that demand,” said Fred Tanzella, CEO of Colocube. “Providing managed private cloud and enterprise cloud services that are both hypervisor neutral and carrier-neutral as a op-ex service verses a cap-ex spend has been appealing to CIOs and CFOs. Our cloud services offer the highest levels of security with monitoring from multiple third-party Internet security firms which resonates with CIO’s that have been concerned with security in the cloud.“

Colocube provides managed cloud, managed hosting, and high-density computing services for mission critical applications that allow enterprises to scale operations while reducing costs and IT infrastructure support.

Equinix (EQIX) acquired the downtown Atlanta data center as part of its acquisition of Switch and Data last year. In discussing the deal, Equinix cited Atlanta as one of the markets where it could benefit from undeveloped space in the Switch & Data data center portfolio.

An overhead view of a Quality Technology Services data center in the Atlanta area.

QTS (Quality Technology Services) has formed a new Enterprise Solutions team to focus on large customers seeking custom data center space. The company says the initiative has already paid dividends with a deal for a major international consulting firm to pre-lease new expansion space in the QTS data center in Suwanee, Georgia.

The Enterprise Solutions team will focus on large-scale footprints  requiring 500 kilowatts to five megawatts in 2,500 – 50,000 square foot configurations. While the first lease was in Suwanee, the initiative may also help QTS line up tenants for its new data center campus in Richmond. With more than 1.2 million square feet of space, the Richmond site offers tremendous flexibility for customers seeking a custom footprint.

“In today’s market, with IT and IT infrastructure being critical to efficient, effective business, QTS recognized the need to have an experienced team dedicated to create large-scale, high-quality, custom data center solutions for customers to meets these needs,” said Tesh Durvasula, Chief Marketing and Business Officer for QTS. “Our new Enterprise Team will allow QTS to offer flexible, scalable solutions for clients who do not want to be locked into a defined solution when they know their needs are going to change. Our Custom Data Center is the most unique product offering in the sector for the large enterprise user.”

The recent pre-leasing of the 15,000 square foot expansion at the QTS Suwanee Data Center provides an illustration. The new space provides approximately 13,500 square feet of raised-floor data center space with up to two megawatts of power in a 2N power configuration, as well as a redundant, chilled water cooling system with N+1 cooling capacity and 1,500 square feet of fully appointed office space dedicated to the customer. QTS completed the build in roughly 90 days.

QTS has built a network of 12 data center facilities spanning more than 3 million square feet of space, growing through acquisitions of facilities and customers from eDeltaCom, IBM, NTT America and Globix. The company offers both wholesale data center space and managed services.

The exterior of the QTS Metro Atlanta data center.

QTS (Quality Technology Services) has closed on a new, $125 million revolving credit facility. The credit facility is secured by the QTS Atlanta Metro Data Center, and includes an “accordion” feature that could allow the company to borrow up to $250 million.

The new credit line has allowed QTS to reduce its debt load by $60 million, while expanding its total credit capacity by $55 million. An accordion provision allows the borrower to expand the credit line if certain conditions are met. Accordion loans secured by data centers have been successfully used by other developers to raise expansion capital, most notably DuPont Fabros Technology.

“We are appreciative of the confidence shown in QTS by the willingness of several financial institutions to participate in this revolving credit facility,” said Bill Schafer, Chief Financial Officer of QTS. “In addition to providing funds which enabled the Company to take advantage of the debt repurchase discount, the facility provides for enhanced financial flexibility and significantly reduces the Company’s outstanding debt and related interest expense. This new facility also establishes relationships with several financial institutions.”

The new revolving credit facility was arranged by Key Bank which also serves as administrative agent. The facility currently includes lead arranger KeyBanc Capital Markets and four additional financial institutions as participants, including Citibank, N.A.; Credit Suisse AG; Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas; and Royal Bank of Canada.

QTS currently owns and operates over 3.1 million square feet of data center space in 12 facilities across seven states. Earlier this year the company announced plans to build a 1.3 million square foot facility in Richmond, Virginia.