“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.

“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.

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.

“We continue to see enterprises outsource their growing data center requirements,” commented David Dunn, senior vice president at CoreSite. “Our move-in-ready data center spaces can accommodate enterprises both big and small, and it allows customers the opportunity to license data center space exactly when they need it.”

The expansion space will feature high-efficiency UPS units, variable-speed fans for air conditioning units and branuch circuit montoring to minimize power bills and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratings for the space.

“At CoreSite we are investing in data center design and construction processes that allow us to deliver more efficient data center space to our customers faster,” said Billie Haggard, CoreSite vice president of data centers. “Delivering new data center space capable of achieving lower P.U.E. levels is a CoreSite corporate initiative that will lower our customer’s overall cost of doing business as well as their carbon footprint.”

Equinix, Inc.

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.

Los Angeles is a strong market for entertainment and digital media customers, who are focused on strong network performance to deliver content to their end users. Equinix specializes in data center peering, allows two providers exchanging large volumes of traffic to save money by connecting directly, rather than routing traffic across their paid Internet connections. 

The new El Segundo facility is part of Equinix’s 2009 expansion program, which will increase the company’s data center footprint in 10 out of 18 markets in which it currently operates. By the end of 2009, the company will have invested over $1 billion in expansions since the start of 2007.

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.”

“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.

Current plans call for a 46,000 square foot data center, which will consolidate the data processing work of nine county departments into a single location. Planners had initially hoped to begin construction in early 2007 on the new facility, which will be designed to meet criteria for a Silver-level certification in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program administered by the U.S. Green Buildings Council. The design calls for the facility to be built partially below ground level, with a vegetated roof and landscaped berms to absorb storm runoff, as well as 23,700 square feet of raised floor space – if it’s ever completed.

Efforts are currently under way to relocate the cats. Los Angeles County says it is sending hundreds of fliers advertising an initiative called Project Barn Cat. “We’re trying to get these cats placed in local barns and equestrian environments, where hay storage makes rats a problem,” Michelle Roache, deputy director of the county’s Department of Animal Services and Control, told UPI.

“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 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.

“This is an exciting time of growth for InteleNet,” said Carlos Oliveira, General Manager of InteleNet. “The additional energy and cooling capacity of this increased space will allow us to satisfy not only our existing customers’ growth plans but new customer demands well into the future. We expect to attract regional businesses seeking a high density data center not only in Irvine and Orange County but also in the outlying Los Angeles metropolitan area.”

InteleNet was founded in 1994, and provides on-demand managed hosting services from a 55,000 square foot carrier-neutral data center located in Irvine. InteleNet’s customers include both small and mid-size businesses and Fortune 500 companies hosting complex e-commerce platforms and financial/ERP systems.

Managed Data Holdings was founded in June 2007 by Catalyst Investors and Great Hill Partners. MDH’s strategy is to invest in data centers in Tier I and Tier II markets in the U.S. to meet enterprise demand for managed hosting, colocation space and disaster recovery services.

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.

Ironically, the DreamHost blog bears a badge about its Bloggers Choice Award nomination as Best Corporate Blog. Transparency is great, but does this support the company’s business? If it’s a joke, it’s a bad joke – except to DreamHost’s competitors, who are likely e-mailing the link around the web.

Then there’s the issue of customer data. From the blog: “Things happened so fast, we ended up just trash compacting about 200 old 36GB fiber channel hard drives that had (private) customer data on them we couldn’t let get into enemy hands.” Doesn’t sound like they got a certification on that data destruction process. Check out features at Network World and ComputerWorld for guidance on best practices on data destruction.

UPDATE, Oct. 6: Several DreamHost employees have added comments to the post saying they were not evicted, but that the company’s lease expired and the building opted not to renew. Yet the post continues to state that the company “didn’t exactly move … we were evicted!” and that “situation is all very complicated, and came about pretty suddenly.” It seems inexplicable that DreamHost would try to get laughs by pretending a lease expiration was an eviction, but that appears to be today’s spin.

The impetus for the upgrades is a new lease by anchor tenant Bank of America, which will pay $28 million to continue leasing 83,000 square feet on the lower levels. Real estate sources said the Bank of America lease was the key to a plan by master lease holder Charter Holdings to upgrade the building. Jason Warner of CB Richard Ellis told industry journal Globe Street that Charter Holdings will invest $30 million to upgrade the infrastructure by doubling the size of the central plant and “significantly increasing the building’s power, back-up power and mechanical equipment.”

The Garland Building made headlines in the summer of 2006, when power problems caused an extended outage for MySpace, the massive social network. On July 24 the building lost all power during a rolling grid outage, as an automatic transfer switch and UPS backup system failed. Then on July 28, the Garland building suffered another loss of power, which was attributed to a dead short while the building was on generator power.

That proved too much for several data center tenants. MySpace moved its operations to the new Equinix facility in El Segundo, while hosting provider media temple also moved out. Switch and Data and shared hosting specialist DreamHost continue to operate data centers in the building. DreamHost, which has experienced strong growth, has cited “space and power constraints” as the reason for relocating servers to a second data center in recent months.