Digital Realty Takes Stake in Westin Building

Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (DLR) has acquired a “partial interest” in the Westin Building in Seattle, the leading Internet gateway in the Pacific Northwest. The investment was one of four deals announced today by Digital Realty, which also acquired data center facilities in the Boston and Miami markets and a warehouse in Tempe, Arizona for conversion to telecom use.

The release from Digital Realty doesn’t indicate the exact dollar value of its investment in the Westin Building, or the size of its partial ownership stake. The total price paid for the four transactions was $79.1 million, according to Digital Realty. Given the size and value of the Westin Building, and the inclusion of three other properties, that price suggests a minority ownership position.

The Westin Building (2001 Sixth Avenue) is a 34-story, 389,000 square foot tower that is 90% leased. Approximately 185,000 square feet is built out as technical space and supports a variety of telecom functions including colocation space and meet-me rooms.

“The addition to our portfolio of the Seattle Internet gateway facility, locally known as the Westin Building, represents a very strategic initial acquisition for us in this tier one market,” said Michael F. Foust, Chief Executive Officer of Digital Realty Trust. “It not only expands our national footprint into the Pacific Northwest, it also adds to our existing portfolio of mission critical Internet gateway facilities in Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix and Charlotte.”

Data Center Outages Bring Headaches, Headlines

July saw a steady stream of data center outages due to equipment failures, several of which attracted media attention. The latest incident to make headlines was an outage July 30 at Seattle’s Fisher Plaza, which is described by CRM Buyer today in a story titled Unsinkable Data Center Crashes in Seattle. The article digs into the cause of the downtime, which is in dispute, as Fisher Plaza cited an equipment problem after a Seattle City Light outage, but the power company says it was never offline.

The recent string of incidents provide a painful reminder that Murphy’s Law has jurisdiction over even the most wired data centers. An AFCOM member survey from April predicted that within the next five years power failures and shortages will halt data center operations (at least briefly) at more than 90% of all companies.

The uptime industry is in the business of trying to anticipate everything that can go wrong, and engineering solutions for even the most improbable scenarios. Although SLAs promising 100% uptime are common nowadays, stuff happens. “Failure is inevitable. Fail small,” said Richard Sawyer, Director of Data Center Technology for American Power Conversion, in discussing the AFCOM results. Outages are painful, but offer lessons as well. In that spirit, here’s a recap of some of the recent incidents:

Quincy: New ‘Power Center’ for Tech Giants

Power costs continue to remake the map of America’s data center infrastructure, as we are reminded today in a Washington Post story about the industry’s growth in Quincy, a small town in central Washington that is the future hoem of data centers for both Microsoft and Yahoo. An outtake:

This small farm town, population 5,300, has become the Klondike of the wildly competitive Internet era. The gold in Quincy is electricity, which technology heavyweights need to operate ever-larger data centers as they fight for world domination.

We’ve tracked the developments in central Washington for some months now. We’ll see more stories like this as local economic development officials come to better understand the benefits of cheap power as a business attraction tool.

Yahoo Picks Wenatchee for Wash. State Site

Yahoo! Inc. has selected Wenatchee, Washington as the location for a new data center, ending a site search in which it explored several locations in central Washington. Yahoo will lease most of the remaining space at the Port of Chelan’s port’s Confluence Technology Center, becoming its largest tenant, the Port announced. Yahoo signed a $6.23 million, 10-year contract to rent 45,000 square feet of space in the four-level building, which opened in May 2004, according to the Associated Press.

“This is great news for North Central Washington - really for the whole state,” said Mike Mackey, president of the Port of Chelan County Commission. “This is the breakthrough we’ve been working toward in our campaign to attract information technology companies to the area. Yahoo is a huge first step and we hope their presence here will attract more investment.”

Microsoft Buys Land for Data Center

Microsoft has bought 75 acres  in Quincy, Wash. and plans to build a new data center at the site, according to local media reports. The software giant bought the land from the Part of Quincy, and has plans for two buildings, according to the Tri-County Herald. Microsoft becomes the second major technology company to express interest in locating a data center in Grant County in central Washington state. The land it has purchased  is not far from Moses Lake, where Yahoo may build a new data center. As was the case with Yahoo, existing infrastructure appears to have been a factor in Microsoft’s choice. “They were very keen on Quincy because of the electrical power and fiber options,” said Pat Boss, spokesman for the Port of Quincy, the industrial park where the site is located. “It was a major driver in their decision.”

SuperbServers Opens Seattle Data Center

SuperbServers.Net has opened its third data center, a facility in the Seattle area that it says will host between 5,000 and 7,000 customer servers. The company did not specifiy the size of the facility in Tukwila, Wash., which is south of Seattle and home to numerous Internet data centers.

The data center is equipped with three 500KVA N+1 redundant UPS’s and a 1.5MW diesel generator power backup system, 180 tons of AC power, with easy expandability up to 540 tons, fibre redundancy through multiple private SONET rings via multiple carriers, and a redundant architecture Gigabit Ethernet-based internal network using Cisco backbone-grade equipment. Superb says it will peer at both at the SIX (Seattle Internet Exchange) and PAIX Seattle, thus reaching almost all the major networks locally.

“We’re tremendously proud of this new facility,” said Haralds Jass, President and CEO of Superb. “Everything is top of the line and designed to provide the very highest level of service to our customers. The Seattle Data Center allows us to offer an even wider range of services and support a broader range of customers.”

“We are planning for significant growth in 2006 and Seattle is a critical component of that plan,” said Sasha Wilson, VP Sales and Marketing for Superb.