Mike Manos Leaves Digital Realty

Mike Manos has resigned from Digital Realty Trust, the company said today. Manos’ departure comes less than a year after joining the company from Microsoft in April 2009. Manos has been one of the data center industry’s most visible executives, and been a regular speaker at major industry conferences and events.

“I have decided to leave the company to focus a bit more on some personal work/life balance issues,” Manos said in a post at his Loose Bolts blog. “With this move comes a new role that I will talk more of in the coming days and weeks. Digital was a great experience and I feel blessed in having made some life-long friends there as well.”

“Mike has made a tremendous contribution to Digital Realty Trust and we greatly appreciate his efforts,” said Michael Foust, CEO of Digital Realty Trust. “We understand that this was a difficult, personal decision for him and we wish him the very best in his future endeavors.”

Digital Realty Sells $500 Million in Notes

Taking advantage of its strong credit rating and improving terms in the credit markets, Digital Realty Trust today said it had commenced a private debt placement of $500 million in senior unsecured notes. Digital Realty said it would use the money to repay borrowings under its revolving credit line, and acquire and develop additional properties.

The latest funding move comes just two weeks after Digital Realty sold $100 million in notes to Prudential. The company also positioned itself to sell up to $400 million in common stock through periodic “at the market” offerings, according to a Dec. 31 SEC filing.

In November Digital Realty Trust was awarded a BBB rating by both Standard & Poors and Fitch, and had previously recevied a Baa2 issuer ratings.

Digital Realty Targets Build-to-Suit Market

Continuing its expansion beyond the wholesale data center market, Digital Realty Trust said today that it will partner with KDC to offer build-to-suit data centers for corporate customers. Digital Realty (DLR), the largest developer of data center properties, said the two companies will partner to build custom data centers for clients, who then lease the building.

“For the first time, customers have a one-stop shop for their build-to-suit data center projects,” said Chris Crosby, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development at Digital Realty Trust. “Additionally, we are able to provide a lease for the custom data center (including the mechanical and electrical plant) without financial contingency, offering a simple financial model that saves customers significant capital.”

Build-to-suit projects are less risky than wholesale multi-tenant data center projects, which are typically built either on a speculative basis or based on a commitment from an anchor customer. In either scenario, the project goes forward before it is entirely leased. 

Terremark Leases Expansion Space in Dallas

Terremark Worldwide (TMRK) has built huge data centers around the world. But when it needed to expand its data center footprint in Dallas, it opted to lease “plug and play” space from Digital Realty Trust (DLR), the largest provider of wholesale data centers.

Digital Realty said this morning that Terremark has leased 10,000 square feet of space in one of its Dallas area facilities. The location was not announced, but a likely suspect is Digital’s huge new campus in Richardson, where it plans to build out up to 800,000 square feet of mission-critical space.

The deal underscores the appeal of Digital Realty’s Turn-key Datacenter program, which  offers customers finished raised-floor data center space, shifting the data center development costs from the tenant to the landlord. This approach allows for much quicker deployment than if the customer built a new facility on its own. 

Digital Realty Confirms LEED Platinum Site

Digital Realty Trust (DLR) has confirmed that its data center at 1525 Comstock in Santa Clara, Calif. has earned Platinum certification under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program from the U.S. Green Building Council.

This is the second LEED Platinum certification that Digital Realty Trust has earned for its properties in Santa Clara, as we noted in our Nov. 24 feature on the company’s Space Park campus.

Digital Realty now has eight LEED-certified facilities in the United States, with 12 additional facilities currently going through the LEED certification process. The company, which is the world’s largest operator of data center properties, also earned the first BREEAM Excellent environment rating in the data center industry for one of its facilities in the United Kingdom.

Digital Realty Pays $375M for New England Sites

Digital Realty has agreed to purchase three sites from Sentinel Data Centers, including this facility in Needham, Mass.

Digital Realty Trust (DLR) said today that it plans to acquire three data center properties in Massachusetts and Connecticut, paying $375 million for 550,000 square feet of buildings operated by Sentinel Data Centers. The deal expands Digital Realty’s footprint in the Boston market, where its three existing properties are fully leased.

Digital Realty also said it may sell up to $400 million in common stock through equity distribution agreements with Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse. The shares will be sold under a shelf registration agreement filed with the SEC in May 2009. Under a shelf registration, a company may sell securities in one or more separate offerings with the size, price and terms to be determined at the time of sale.

In Santa Clara, ‘Green’ Speeds Toward Platinum

1201 Comstock is one of the Digital Realty data centers in Santa Clara, Calif. that has received a LEED Platinum certification.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – An unassuming industrial park near San Jose Airport is hardly where you’d expect to find some of the greenest acres in the data center industry. The Santa Clara, Calif., campus operated by Digital Realty Trust is home to three data centers with a Platinum or Gold rating under the LEED standard for energy efficient buildings.

Digital Realty, the largest data center operator in the U.S., has used its Santa Clara operation to refine an energy efficient design using fresh-air cooling, which has made the site a magnet for some of the fastest-growing companies in the digital economy.

Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo all have their servers housed here. NVIDIA, which is seeking to harness its GPU technology to power cloud and high performance computing, has leased an entire data center here as well.

Clients Like LEED Data Centers
The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard is not designed with data centers in mind, and is just one of several indicators of the energy efficiency of a data center, along with Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). But there are signs that the LEED designation is growing in importance for data center tenants, who like the standard as a benchmark for corporate social responsibility.

Where LEED certification was once seen as a difficult hurdle for mission-critical sites, companies like Digital Realty are demonstrating the ability to build data centers to the very highest levels of the specification, and do so with remarkable speed. The two LEED Platinum facilities at the Santa Clara campus were completed in less than eight months, far less than the 18 to 24 months typically required for an enterprise data center project.

Digital Realty Buys Santa Clara Data Centers

Digital Realty Trust (DLR) has acquired two data center facilities in Santa Clara, Calif. for $90.5 million, the company said today. The facilities at 1350 Duane Avenue, and 3080 Raymond Street are adjacent to Digital Realty’s primary data center campus in Santa Clara, and are both fully-leased to Internet service providers.

The larger building, 1350 Duane Avenue, consists of 160,000 square feet of data center space. The entire building is leased on a triple net basis to Sprint, who in 2004 subleased the building to a major colocation provider. The second property at 3080 Raymond Street totals 25,000 square feet and is leased on a triple net basis to a Layer 42 Networks, which provides Internet services and business applications.

The announcement comes just days after Digital Realty signaled its intent to buy additional occupied data centers as income properties, which generate revenue through rent from existing tenants.

Roundup: Indiana University, Telecity, Cisco

Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:

• Indiana University to Unveil Data Center: Indiana University announced Monday that their $32.7 million data center will be unveiled Nov. 5.  The 82,700 square foot facility houses critical computing, networking and storage equipment (over 2.8 petabytes) that serve the University.  Indiana University is also home to supercomputers Big Red and Quarry and the hub of Indiana’s statewide I-Light fiber network. The University also has an agreement with the Indiana Office of Technology that provides the state with backup data space and network connectivity. The data center will be be the foundation of a new IU Bloomington Technology Park.
• Telecity’s Demand-led Capacity Expansion:. European data center provider Telecity Group issued an interim management statement Monday highlighting several positive growth trends.  With a healthy pipeline, revenue growth has continued to be in line with management’s expectations. Meeting strong customer demand in existing markets, TelecityGroup has delivered incremental new capacity in London, Amersterdam, Frankfurt, Stockholm and Milan to date this year.  A new Paris 3 data center is on schedule to open in December 2009. ”Our premium data centres continue to win new and expanded customer orders, with the most notable wins in the third quarter coming from the content, connectivity, financial and application provider segments,”  said Telecity CEO Michael Tobin. Telecity Group operates 22 network independent data centers across seven European countries and is headquartered in London.