Telx Expands LA Data Center Footprint

Interconnection specialist Telx has expanded the footprint of its colocation facility at 600 West 7th Street in Los Angeles by 40 percent, the company said today. A third of the expansion space is pre-sold, Telx said, which it cited as evidence of solid demand for colo space and interconnection services in the Los Angeles market.

“As demand for colocation space on the West Coast continues to increase, Telx remains committed to helping our customer base reduce the cost of network expansion and increase speed to market,” said Eric Shepcaro, CEO of Telx. “Our Los Angeles facility is a strategically located, high-density connectivity hub that can immediately meet the latency, security and services requirements of the most demanding cloud computing, media and entertainment, gaming and financial services environments.”

The new space is the second expansion in less than a year for Telx at the 600 West 7th Street carrier, following an addition last fall.

Telx Expands in Los Angeles

Colocation and interconnection specialist Telx has expanded its footprint by 50 percent in Los Angeles by expanding into adjacent space at 600 West 7th Street. Telx is the building-sanctioned interconnection provider at 600 West 7th Street, and said the additional space will provide expansion options for its media and entertainment, gaming and financial services customers.

“Our new expansion space at 600 West 7th offers the latest in power optimization and raised-floor cooling to ensure minimal environmental impact, while providing some of the highest power densities and proximity capabilities in the West Coast data center market,” said J. Todd Raymond, Senior Vice President of Site Acquisitions for Telx.

CoreSite Expands in Los Angeles

The interior of CoreSite's Los Angeles data center. The company said today that it is expanding its footprint by 2 megawatts.

Colocation and peering provider CoreSite continues to expand its data center footprint. Just a week after announcing an expansion in northern Virginia, the company says it is also planning a 2 megawatt expansion of its Los Angeles data center at 900 N. Alameda. The additional capacity is scheduled to be delivered in the first quarter of 2010.

The project will address growing enterprise demand for wholesale “move-in-ready” data center space in downtown Los Angeles, according to CoreSite, which says the new space could be delivered as either a private data center suite for a single enterprise customer, or partitioned to allow cage-to-cabinet colocation.

Equinix Opens New Los Angeles Data Center

Equinix, Inc. (EQIX) today announced the opening of its fourth data center in the Los Angeles area, a 177,000 square foot International Business Exchange (IBX) facility that will eventually house 3,000 cabinets. The $95 million first phase of the LA4 data center will support 800 cabinets, helping the colocation and interconnection specialist meet demand from companies in the entertainment and digital media sectors.

The new LA4 facility is located near Equinix’s existing LA3 center in El Segundo, and is linked to that building and Equinix’s two downtown Los Angeles centers through the IBXLink service, which provides redundant fiber links that enable customers to connect to each other across the four centers as if they were located in the same building.

$50M Lease for Net2EZ at Garland Building

Net2EZ Managed Data Centers has leased more than 50,000 square feet of data center space at the Garland Center at 1200 W. Seventh Street in Los Angeles, Globe Street reported this week. The 10-year lease, which is valued at more than $50 million, is one of the largest office deals in Los Angeles this year.

Net2EZ also has data center space at the 365 Main facility in El Segundo and DuPont Fabros Technology’s ACC4 data center in Ashburn, Va. The company is expanding on both coasts, having recently announced a substantial lease at ACC5, the new DuPont Fabros facility in Ashburn scheduled to open later this year.

Net2EZ’s lease at the Garland Center marks a return to the building for the company, which left after a lengthy power outage in 2006. The ownership of the Garland Center has since completed a $40 million project to improve the building’s electrical and mechanical infrastructure. Net2EZ co-founder Pervez Delawalla told Globe Street that the $40 million investment has turned the Garland Center into “one of the premier critical facility buildings in Los Angeles.”

Feral Cats Block $68M Los Angeles Data Center

A $68 million project to build a new high-tech data center for Los Angeles County is being held up because the property is occupied – by 150 wild cats. The new facility is to be built at the Rancho Los Amigos South Campus in Downey, parts of which have fallen into disrepair. Plans to raze buildings to make way for the data center have been held up by the presence of the feral cats, as reported in today’s Los Angeles Times. Here’s an excerpt:

“It’s a [long pause] difficult situation,” said Jan Takata of the county’s Chief Administrative Office, which oversees Rancho’s south campus. … For starters, figuring out what to do with feral cats has vexed animal control managers, veterinarians and biologists around the world. The never-tamed offspring of abandoned or lost pets, they are usually too wild to be adopted as house pets. Trapping feral cats to euthanize them is time-consuming, expensive and far from foolproof. And killing the cats on site is not palatable to the public, as Wisconsinites discovered in 2005 when not even hunters wanted to legalize cat shoots.

Many of the buildings on the Rancho Los Amigos South Campus have stood empty since the late 1980s. The county data center was seen as an ideal project to rehabilitate the site.

One Wilshire, Illustrated

Wired provides a photo tour of One Wilshire, the Los Angeles carrier hotel that provides space and interconnections for more than 260 ISPs and telcos. The photos illustrate the kind of cabling you see in the world’s densest meet-me room. If you like data center tours and cabling photos, you’ll want to have a look.

“If this facility went down, most of California and parts of the rest of the world would not be able to connect to the Internet,” notes Wired, which describes One Wilshire as “one of the web’s largest nerve centers, hidden in an otherwise nondescript office building.” Hines REIT bought One Wilshire from The Carlyle Group for $287 million last August.

InteleNet Expands Irvine Data Center

Managed Data Holdings (MDH) is already expanding its data center footprint. The company, which is backed by private equity firms and acquired Data393 earlier this month, is pumping up the infrastructure at one of its existing properties. Irvine, Calif.-based managed hosting provider InteleNet Communications, which was bought by MDH in October, has started construction on a data center expansion that will add 12,000 square feet of space engineered to support high density computing customers.

Intelenet had planned the expansion for later in 2008. With its acquisition by Managed Data Holdings, the new space is now expected to be ready for customers in March. InteleNet has already begun pre-selling space in the expansion space.

DreamHost Evicted From LA Offices

In an item yesterday we noted that DreamHost was among the remaining data center tenants at the Garland Building in Los Angeles. We may have spoken too soon. The hosting company has posted a blog item announcing its eviction from its Los Angeles offices, which the company attributes to “a little bit too much bringing alcohol into the building, playing pool, neighbor complaints about loud profanities.” What’s more, the item (attributed to co-founder Josh Jones) ads that “our new office space isn’t even ready yet!” (See the end of this post for an update).

I have to wonder what DreamHost’s new landlords will think when they read the blog item. I can appreciate that a humorous, offbeat reputation may play well for some hosting companies. DreamHost has certainly cultivated that image with its blog. But the eviction post (complete with photos) screams the question of whether there are any grown-ups running either the company or the blog.