The acquisition expands the operating footprint for T5 Partners, which has been actively marketing build-to-suit data center sites near Charlotte and an Atlanta facility offering wholesale data center space. “T5′s plan is to build a national footprint of wholesale data center space,” said Marin, who said the company is scouting two to three additional markets. “I think we’re developing a solution that’s in demand in this market.”

The building at 44 North Nash Street was previously owned by Base Partners, a veteran developer of data center properties, which was marketing it as “powered shell” space with the power and fiber connectivity in place. T5 will instead build out data center space and market the property as wholesale “plug and play” raised-floor data center space. This model offers a lower up-front capital cost for the tenant, and quicker deployment than if the customer built a new facility on its own.

The facility is in El Segundo, a sub-market of Los Angeles near LAX airport, which is already home to large data centers for Digital Realty Trust and Equinix. El Segundo offers cheaper power rates then downtown Los Angeles, a key consideration for data center operators. Marin said T5 expects to have a rate of about 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity.

The property has an on-site 20MVA substation and 121,486 square foot shell, which may be further expanded in a second phase of the project. The space is configurable to client requirements, ranging from 2,500 square feet to 72,000 square feet.

T5 is currently building a second data center at its Kings Mountain campus in North Carolina, where IT outsourcing firm Wipro leased its first building.The company has has finished construction on a 146,000 square foot powered shell on a parcel at KingsMountain that can support nearly 600,000 square feet of  data center space. T5 is also marketing a 100,000 square foot building in Alpharetta, Georgia.

The Los Angeles data center will be located just 6 miles from the airport and include 55,000 square feet of sellable data center footprint over time.  The first phase of approximately 15,000 square feet will open in the second quarter of 2012.

“According to Tier 1 Research, the utilization of colocation space available in the Los Angeles area exceeds 90 percent,” said Mike Higgins, senior vice president of data center services at Internap. “With the addition of Los Angeles to our portfolio, Internap is able to provide these growing enterprises with data center space that can be tailored to their specific IT Infrastructure needs – from colocation, managed hosting and cloud services to high-performance enterprise IP and Content Delivery Network services – and can quickly scale to support their business growth requirements”

The Los Angeles data center will also feature a full range of customer amenities, including fully equipped office areas, technical workspaces, dedicated customer work environments and a full-service customer lounge.

Planning for the future

Internap says they will leverage modular designs and support power densities of up to 12 kW per cabinet. It will also employ high efficiency UPS system, free-cooling methods and other sustainable operational best practices. Internap will submit the data center for Green Globes certification, LA County Green Building Standards compliance, LEED certification and an Energy Star rating.

Internap also released first quarter 2011 financial results Thursday, with revenue of $59.4 million compared with $63.4 million in the first quarter of 2010.  The first quarter of 2011 is the last quarter impacted by a program in place to proactively churn certain less-profitable contracts in partner data centers. Cash and cash equivalents totaled $46.3 million at March 31, 2011.

“We believe the first quarter of 2011 represents an inflection point from which the company returns to top-line growth in both of our business units, Data center services and IP services,” said Eric Cooney, President and Chief Executive Officer of Internap. “Positive trends across the business including: bookings growth, reduced churn, and enhanced customer satisfaction, give us confidence in our expectation for sequential revenue growth in the second quarter.”

“With the opportunities presented by our new product roadmap, it became clear that now was the time to raise our first round of growth capital,” said Demian Sellfors, CEO of Media Temple. “The new investment will help us to continue the quality of our growth in the future. We are especially pleased to be associated with Triangle Capital and GMB Mezzanine Capital who both have strong relationships and domain expertise in our industry.”

Coverage at TechCrunch focused on Media Temple using the funding for product development and pursuing an outreach to developers as well as small business customers. But regional expansion and acquisitions are also clearly in the mix of options.

“We look forward to continuing to provide support for Media Temple as it focuses on accelerating go-to-market initiatives across new geographies and product lines, evaluates synergistic acquisition opportunities, and secures its position as a leading Virtualization Services Provider,” said Gene Ramirez, a Managing Director of the investment bank Morgan Joseph, which advised Media Temple on the transaction and arranged the financing.

Media Temple has experienced strong growth, and hosts about 85,000 customers. The company was among the first to introduce a virtualized grid hosting service, and has hosted many of the most prominent technology blogs.

“Media Temple has an outstanding record of growth, a blue chip roster of clients and thought leaders, and an outstanding culture of innovation and customer service,” said Cary Nordan, a principal of Triangle Capital. “Despite a challenging economic environment over the past couple of years, we were impressed that Media Temple continued to experience strong, profitable growth. (mt) is strongly positioned as a leader in the markets they serve. Demian Sellfors, John Carey and their team have built a great company, and we look forward to partnering with them as (mt) initiates the next phase of growth.”

“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.