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Green Means Business for Fortune Data Centers
May 7th, 2009 : Rich Miller
The new Fortune Data Centers facility in San Jose, Calif.
With the enterprise sector thinking green, John Sheputis spends a lot of time talking about the energy efficiency of the new Fortune Data Centers facility in San Jose, Calif. Sheputis, the CEO of Fortune, says the 78,000 square foot facility is on track to earn a Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
The payoff – the green the matters most – is that the Fortune data center has opened its doors with an anchor tenant occupying more than a quarter of its 43,000 square feet of equipment space. Sheputis didn’t disclose the tenant’s identity, but predicted that it will have company soon.
“There’s not a lot of new data center supply coming online” in Silicon Valley, Sheputis said. “There are certainly large tenants in the market.”
The energy efficiency piece is critical, Sheputis said, because it has quickly become a key decision point for tenants. “One of the major things I’ve seen changing in the business is the focus on efficiency,” he said. “A year ago, I wouldn’t have thought that (energy metrics) would have been this important. It’s taken the industry by storm.”
In particular, customers are focused on Power Usage Effectiveness, the Green Grid metric that compares a facility’s total power usage to the amount of power used by the IT equipment, revealing how much is lost in distribution and conversion. An average PUE of 2.0 indicates that the IT equipment uses about 50 percent of the power to the building.
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Terremark Delays Santa Clara Project
February 9th, 2009 : Rich MillerTerremark (TMRK) has decided to delay construction on its planned data center in Santa Clara, Calif., saying it will instead focus its development budget on its booming business at its data fortress in Virginia, the NAP of the Capital Region.
Terremark’s planned expansion on Corvin Drive is the second major data center project in Santa Clara sidelined by capital constraints related to the credit crunch. DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) halted development of a $270 million data center in Santa Clara in October after it was able to borrow less than it hoped to fund the project.
The postponements are likely to mean a tighter market for data center space in Santa Clara, which has been the busiest area in Silicon Valley due to low power rates from the local utility, Silicon Valley Power. While there is no immediate space crunch, the mothballing of the two projects eliminates at least 200,000 square feet of data center space that was to arrive in 2009 .
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Will Santa Clara’s Data Center Boom Continue?
November 5th, 2008 : Rich MillerSanta Clara, Calif. has been a hotbed of data center activity this year. But will this trend continue? The city’s combination of affordable electric power and a prime location in Silicon Valley has made it a magnet for data centers, and most of the major data center developers have been expanding in Santa Clara.
But last week DuPont Fabros said it would suspend constructionon its planned $270 million data center campus in Santa Clara. The company’s plans called for a pair of 300,000 square foot data center buildings with a power capacity of 72 megawatts. DuPont Fabros said its decision was driven by spending constraints after it raised $100 million, rather the $300 million it had hoped, from a refinancing of one of its Virginia properties.
Does the decision represent a change in sentiment about demand in the Santa Clara market? Or was it driven solely by internal factors at DuPont Fabros? We’ll hear more from DFT when it releases its earnings. But we also touched base with data center developers with active projects in Silicon Valley.
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CRG West Plans New Santa Clara Data Center
July 23rd, 2008 : Rich MillerCRG West will build a data center campus in Santa Clara, Calif., continuing the company’s expansion of its data center footprint. The new project adds to the data center boom in Santa Clara, which is currently the focus of major new facilities from most of the industry’s largest players.
CRG West has closed on land for 350,000 square feet of data center and office space. Construction will start in August on the first building, with scheduled completion in the second quarter of 2009. The phased 50 megawatt development will be powered by Silicon Valley Power, the utility whose low power rates have made the city of Santa Clara a magnet for data center projects.
The first phase of the project will provide data center and peering services for CRG West customers, ranging from single-cabinet colocation space up to blocks of wholesale of up to 20 megawatts of power. The company is offering one of the planned buildings as a custom opportunity for a single user as part of CRG West’s recently-announced build-to-suit program for companies looking to expand their data center space while conserving capital.
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Fortune Data Centers Readies San Jose Facility
July 21st, 2008 : Rich MillerWhen Fortune Data Centers was looking for its first development project in 2006, it anticipated the importance of power and cooling in new facilities. “What we saw was that everybody would be looking for old data centers and then want to add power and cooling,” said John Sheputis, the company’s founder and CEO. “We thought, ‘let’s go find a mission-critical building that already had the power and cooling and then bring the fiber to it.’ We decided that a retiring fab (semiconductor fabrication facility) would have the power and cooling we needed.”
Sheputis and his partners acquired a former Seagate fabrication facility in San Jose, Calif., and are busy transforming the site into a 140,000 square foot data center in the heart of Silicon Valley. Fortune Data Centers plans to complete the 80,000 square foot first phase of the project in October.
It turns out that Sheputis didn’t have to look far to find fiber. The facility is sandwiched between data centers for NTT and Verizon. “The buildings property lines are wrapped in fiber,” said Sheputis.
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Bank of America Selling Concord Tech Center
July 7th, 2008 : Rich MillerBank of America (BAC) is seeking to sell the Concord Technology Center, a 1 million square foot campus that includes a large data center, according to East Bay Business Times (subscription). About 2,500 people work at the four-building campus in Concord, Calif., down from a high of about 3,700. Bank of America is seeking to lease the properties back from the buyer for a minimum of two years.
The list price wasn’t disclosed, but the paper cited sources saying it would likely be in the neighborhood of $200 million, or $200 a square foot. The Concord Technology Center was built in 1985, and has been used by BofA for disaster recovery and software development. The facility played a key role in the bank’s operations during the Loma Prieta (World Series) earthquake in 1989, supporting the bank’s electronic networks while its primary data center in San Francisco switched to generator power.
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Santa Clara: The Hottest Data Center Market?
June 25th, 2008 : Rich MillerData center demand remains strong, and no market is any hotter than Santa Clara, California. The city, long known as a data center hub for Silicon Valley, will soon be home to new data centers for Facebook and Yahoo. Several major data center developers have expansions planned for Santa Clara later this year, including Dupont Fabros (DFT) and Terremark (TMRK).
“I think (Santa Clara) is one of the best markets in the country, and I wish we had product available sooner,” said Hossein Fateh, President and CEO of DuPont Fabros, who said demand has accelerated because the city has cheaper power (about 7 cents per kilowatt hour) than many other areas of Silicon Valley. “Historically, from an Internet standpoint, that’s been the best market in the country. If you’re after a 3 megawatt or 5 megawatt (data center) deal, it doesn’t make sense to go to the Pacific Northwest because you have to take whole team.”
Manuel Medina, the CEO of Terremark Worldwide, says his company already has strong demand for its planned expansion in Santa Clara. “We expect to break ground on the project on the second half of this fiscal year, and we expect to have an executed (customer) contract before breaking ground. A lot of the demand is coming from existing customers in our current facility, which is immediately adjacent to the land where the project will be located.”
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New Data Center Space in San Francisco
April 17th, 2008 : Rich MillerThere’s been a boom in new data center development in Silicon Valley, with particularly strong activity in Santa Clara. It’s been a different story in San Francisco, which has had strong leasing activity in existing carrier hotels and data centers (especially Digital Realty’s 200 Paul Avenue and 365 Main), but little in the way of new data center development.
Earlier this month Cardiff Mason Development began seeking data center tenants for 1828 Egbert, a 120,000 square foot San Francisco facility. The four-story property features 32,000 square feet of space on each of the top three floors, and 23,000 square feet on the ground floor. The site is configured for 14 megawatts of power.
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UnitedLayer Expands at 200 Paul, Again
April 7th, 2008 : Rich MillerFor several years now, multi-tenant data center operators have cited existing customers seeking additional data center space as a factor in their expansions. A compelling example of this trend is seen in UnitedLayer’s continued expansion at 200 Paul Avenue in San Francisco.
Last week UnitedLayer announced its third expansion in the last seven months at 200 Paul, the carrier hotel owned by Digital Realty Trust (DLR). UnitedLayer has leased an additional 6,000 square feet of space through Digital’s Turn-Key Datacenter program.
“We have seen an exciting growth trend across our service offerings,” said Richard Donaldson, COO of UnitedLayer. “The acquisition of this space is a tremendous boon to our customers and an excellent opportunity to offer more facility options to current and future clients.”
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