The project will add 15,000 net sellable square feet of capacity to Internap’s current footprint in Seattle, with the new space expected to open during the third quarter of 2010. “Seattle was a compelling choice for expansion because of our multi-facility footprint, local market knowledge, existing sales and support infrastructure as well as our ability to leverage brand reputation,” said Internap CEO Eric Cooney. “We feel this market offers Internap a unique opportunity to expand with relatively low risk and relatively high reward.”

Seeking Improved Margins
The shift in data center strategy is driven by the opportunity to realize better profit margins. Internap’s data center revenue is about evenly split between in-house data centers and space leased from providers like Equinix. In Thursday’s conference call with analysts, Cooney said Internap sees a 50 percent margin on customers in company-operated data centers, as opposed to 5 percent in partner facilities.

“Going forward, we will continue to execute our data center strategy to focus on growth and company control data centers, while we proactively reduce our partner data center providers to a small number of mutually beneficial relationships,” he said.

How will that be accomplished? “We intend to proactively churn select loss making and or low margin partner colocation revenue,” said Cooney. “As most of these contracts are short term being less than 12 months in many cases we will simply choose not to renew these contracts. In other cases, we are seeking to renegotiate the contract and pass the customer directly to the data center provider. In both scenarios we expect to retain the Internap value added services such as IP transit or CDN which those customers are also taking.”

Internap said it expects this will mean a quarterly decline of about $5 million in partner colocation revenue by the fourth quarter of 2010, but will boost the profitmargins on the remaining partner data center space from the current 5 percent to about 20 percent.

This map from the City of Tukwila, Wash. shows the location of the Sabey Intergate.East data center complex in relation to areas facing potential flooding this fall (diagonal lines).

Public officials in Tukwila, Wash. are preparing for potentially serious flooding in the Seattle suburb, but the owner of a major data center complex in town says its facilities are outside the threatened area. Sabey Corp., which operates the Intergate.East Technology Campus, says the development will remain “high and dry” in any flooding related to problems with the Howard Hanson dam.

The dam was damaged during heavy rainfall last winter, prompting the Army Corps of Engineers to restrict water levels behind the dam. This will increase the volume of water in the Green River, raising the possibility that seasonal fall rains could overtop the levees and flood sections of Tukwila, Renton, Kent, South Seattle and Auburn.  

Microsoft Among Tenants
Intergate.East is home to data centers for Microsoft and Internap and is separated from the Green River by Highway 599, which is expected to serve as a buffer for any flood waters. Sabey addressed the issue in a letter to tenants (PDF) last month.

“We are pleased to confirm what we have always believed, that Intergate.East is not in danger of flooding from any increased water flows in the Green and Duwamish Rivers,” wrote Sabey, which also has published a map from the City of Tukwila documenting the potential flood zones.

“The property is outside the projected flood areas in both the FEMA Flood Area Maps and the Corp of Engineers Inundation Flood Maps,” it continued. “Even under the Corp of Engineer’s projected worst case scenarios, Intergate.East remains well above the flood level and away from any levee areas, safe from the Green River’s influence on the Duwamish.” Sabey also said that Intergate.East would not be at risk if the Hanson Dam failed completely.

State of Emergency for King County
Other areas businesses and residents may not be so lucky. As many as 26,000 residents may need to be evacuated in the case of a levee breach, according to King County officials, who have already declared a state of emergency to expedite work to reinforce the local levee system.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assesses the odds of a flood at 1-in-3. The state Transportation Department and State Patrol are identifying evacuation routes. A major flood could close state Route 167, which carries about 100,000 vehicles a day.

A picture of the damage to two bus ducts at Fisher Plaza in Seattle from a July electrical incident that caused a major outage for its data center tenants.

A major power outage that disrupted data centers at Seattle’s Fisher Plaza in July was probably caused by an insulation failure in an electrical bus duct that connected the building to the power grid, according to a report to tenants by the building’s owner.

The July 2 incident knocked payment processor Authorize.net offline, disrupting e-commerce for thousands of web sites, while also causing lengthy downtime for Microosft’s Bing Travel service, domain registrar Dotster, colocation company Internap and web hosting provider AdHost,

An investigation by Power Science Engineering Inc. of Shoreline, Wash. concluded that the failure of two bus ducts – enclosures housing copper bars to conduct electricity – in a basement power room of Fisher Plaza was likely caused by “progressive degradation” of insulation, which ultimately led the bus duct to fail. The incident report is available at the TechFlash web site.

No Single ‘Stimulus’ 
Investigators said such failures are usually prompted by a “stimulus” such as movement of the duct or sudden changes in large loads, but that none of those conditions existed at the time of the failure at 11:11 p.m. on July 2. Power Science concluded that the insulation wore down over time due to thermal and mechanical stresses at a bend in the duct.

The report rejected two other theories – that the bus duct was damaged by a falling light fixture or an accidental triggering of a sprinkler system. A flourescent light fixture was found laying on top of the bus duct, but investigators said the fixture collapse was caused by the “significant heat” from the electrical failure.

Water Damage Discounted
The report also found no evidence that the sprinkler system turned on prior to the electrical event, and noted that the bus duct was enclosed in a water-tight metal container. The initial report from the Seattle Fire Department said that “engineers suspect that water on the copper plates (of the bus) resulted in an arc and the subsequent fire damage.”

The Power Science report noted that “routine maintenance and testing” such as load data and infrared scanning can help detect problems with aging power infrastructure, although this is more difficult for enclosed components like bus bars inside ducts. Fisher Plaza officials told TechFlash they conducted regular infrared and thermal scans and physical inspection of the equipment.

Power Science Engineering also said bus ducts can be separated to limit damage from a failure, or replaced by cables. “In our opinion, use of cable systems at critical locations can be a better option to bus ways because the cable systems use insulated cables instead of bus bars,” the report said.

Building owner Fisher Communications has been powering Fisher Plaza using temporary generators while it rebuilds the core power infrastructure. The new design will use bus ducts, but will separate them to avoid simultaneous failures.

Switch and Data said the expansion was needed to meet high customer demand for interconnections at The Westin Building, a major communications hub for IP traffic traversing the Northern Transpacific undersea fiber route between North America and Asia.

The new space can support power densities of 200 watts per square foot, and was finished in December, completing Switch and Data’s 2008 capacity expansion plan.

“Our Seattle market expansion builds on our plan to help our customers accelerate their Internet-centric businesses with high performance and availability,” said Ernie Sampera, Senior VP of Marketing for Switch and Data. “Switch and Data facilities give our customers access to a critical mass of network and bandwidth providers across the broadest footprint of key communications hub markets in North America.”

More than 20 networks have a presence in Switch and Data’s four suites in the 34-story Westin Building, which was built in 1981 and contains approximately 185,000 square feet of technical space, including colocation space and meet-me rooms to support its communications and technology tenants.

Switch and Data also operates a Seattle data center at The Securities Building Technology Center at 1914 Third Avenue. Switch and Data has interconnected its two Seattle sites to increase connectivity options for its customers.

Fisher Plaza is a Class A office, data center and retail campus near the Space Needle with approximately 294,000 rentable square feet. In 2008, Fisher expects the property to generate approximately $7.5 million in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization).

Internap (INAP) has a significant data center presence at Fisher Plaza, while other industry tenants include Adhost, Cogent Communications (CCOI), Electric Lightwave, AboveNet, Global Crossing, Time Warner Telecom and Qwest. Fisher Plaza also operates its own colocation space in the building

“While Fisher Plaza has been a desirable facility to develop and own, it represents a very valuable non-core asset that we do not believe is fully reflected in the value of the Company,” said Colleen B. Brown, Fisher’s president and CEO.

Fisher Communications owns 20 television stations and eight radio stations, including Seattle’s KOMO TV and KOMO radio stations, which are housed in Fisher Plaza. The two buildings at Fisher Plaza were completed in 2000 and 2003, replacing an earlier building that housed the KOMO operations.

The 1130 Rainier site, which was once the headquarters of digital music company Loudeye, would have housed the county’s elections equipment in addition to the data center. The county opted to lease space in Renton for the elections office, and seek separate digs for its data center. Critics say that splitting the data center and elections office requirements will be $15 million more than the estimated cost of buying and retrofitting the Seattle site, but some council members say the estimate for a rehab of 1130 Rainier may be on the low side.

Ask.com’s decision continues the data center building boom in central Washington State, where four other major projects are already underway. Microsoft has announced plans for a huge data center complex in Quincy, as has Intuit. Meanwhile, Yahoo and Sabey Corp. are starting projects in nearby Wenatchee.

Cook notes that although Ask.com didn’t disclose the exact location of its site, one obvious possibility in Moses lake would be the Titan building, a former NORAD Missile Control Center that’s been converted to data center use.

Central Washington has become a favored destination for data centers due to its plentiful supply of hydro power from dams on the Columbia River. The projects by Yahoo, Microsoft and Sabey are all huge facilities that will likely be filled with high-density computing installations featuring thousands of servers, requiring enormous amounts of power.

“This initiative is part of a strategic plan to enhance our data center offerings in key markets,” said James P. DeBlasio, chief executive officer of Internap. “With this expansion at Sabey, Internap now has its eighth managed facility, which demonstrates our commitment to serving our customers.”

For high power density customer implementations, the new Seattle infrastructure will support up to 150 watts per square foot. The expansion also supports increased access to the Internap Performance IP, a premium Internet connectivity service, which includes up to 10 gigabits per second handoffs for customers deploying next-generation applications such as video and rich media. Nearly all customers located in Internap data centers purchase the Performance IP service.

In 2006 Internap announced data center expansions in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Toronto to meet additional demand in those markets. The company currently has equipment installed in 39 managed and partner data centers, serving customers ranging in size from small start-ups to enterprises, including Digital Insight, Fry Multimedia, FX Alliance and Grisoft SRO, among others.

Internap provides intelligent route control solutions that help enterprises take full advantage of business-critical applications such as e-commerce, Voice-over-IP (VoIP), video-conferencing and streaming audio/video across IP networks. Internap’s network helps customers bypass congestion points, overcome routing inefficiencies and optimize performance of their applications.