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Internap Expands Again in Seattle
February 7th, 2007 : Rich MillerInternap (INAP) plans to add approximately 20,000 square feet to its Seattle data center real estate, marking its second expansion in six months in the Seattle market. Citing strong customer demand, Internap will lease space from Sabey Corporation at its Intergate data center in Tukwila, just outside Seattle. The deal includes an option to expand furtehr into an additional 30,000 square feet of contiguous data center space. The expansion increases Internap’s Seattle-area colocation footprint by 50 percent, and builds on an August expansion at Internap’s facility at Fisher Plaza in downtown Seattle. Completion is expected in June of 2007.
“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.”
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Qwest Opens Seattle Data Center
February 6th, 2007 : Rich MillerQwest Communications (Q) has opened a new “CyberCenter” in the Seattle area to provide hosting services to businesses, the company said this week. With the opening of the new data center, Qwest now operates 14 CyberCenters nationwide. New tenants in the center include Alaska Airlines.
“We are seeing a significant increase in the demand for Qwest managed hosting solutions, and the new Qwest CyberCenter will allow Qwest to expand the number of customers we can serve with leading broadband applications and network services,” said Dan Yost, executive vice president of product and marketing at Qwest. “Opening the newest facility in Seattle demonstrates Qwest’s continued success in the hosting arena and our ongoing commitment to providing the most comprehensive and secure solutions available.”
It’s interesting to see Qwest building additional data centers, as the company’s hosting unit experienced the full rollercoaster ride back in the dot-com boom. Qwest expanded vigorously, building 50,000 to 90,000 square foot Cybercenters in most major markets. At one time Qwest planned to build as many as 42 CyberCenters, funded partly by a $5 billion strategic alliance with IBM. But in late 2002 the company consolidated its network, shutting eight of its 16 data centers.
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Microsoft Drops Suit Over Records Request
December 12th, 2006 : Rich MillerMicrosoft has dropped a lawsuit against the city of Quincy, Wash. seeking to prevent the disclosure of public records the company filed concerning its huge new data center project in the town. Microsoft filed suit Nov. 30 seeking an injunction to block the city from complying with a public records request from an engineering firm seeking design and building plans Microsoft submitted for its data center. Microsoft dropped the lawsuit after the request was withdrawn.
Microsoft began construction in Quincy in May, and much has been written about the facility. But Microsoft contended that the documents sought through the information request contained “intricate details” of its building project, City Administrator Tim Snead told the Columbia Basin Herald. “We protect the proprietary information we have for our software, for our products and certainly for our facilities, where we’re doing some unique things,” Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos told the paper.
We’ve previously noted the desire of major corporations to maintain secrecy about their data center projects (see Wal-Mart and the Fight Club Rule for more on this). But is it possible to maintain secrecy about a facility and still comply with local ordinances that require companies to file detailed plans about new construction?
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Intuit Planning Data Center in Quincy, Wash.
November 9th, 2006 : Rich MillerFinancial software giant Intuit is planning to build a data center in Quincy, Wash., which would become the fourth major data center project in the small central Washington town. Intuit, which makes Quicken and Quickbooks software, appeared before the Quincy City Counil Tuesday night to discuss its plans.
Three other major facilities are already planned for the area, which has become magnet for power-hungry data centers due to the availability of cheap hydro electricity from local dams, as well as advanced fiber infrastructure. Microsft has announced plans for a huge data center complex in Quincy, while Yahoo and Sabey Corp. are starting projects in nearby Wenatchee.
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Digital Realty’s Westin Stake: 49 Percent
November 8th, 2006 : Rich MillerDigital Realty Trust paid $30.2 million to acquire a 49 percent stake in the Westin Building, Seattle’s premier Internet Gateway, according to company documents. The size of the payment and Digital Realty’s ownership position wasn’t detailed in the Nov. 2 press release announcing the investment, but was included in the company’s quarterly 10Q filing with the SEC.
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. In an investor conference call, Digital Realty executives said the entire Westin Building was not for sale, so it bought a 49 percent interest from one of two partners in the building. Digital Realty had been discussing an interest in the Westin Building for more than two years, and is clearly excited about the deal.
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Digital Realty Takes Stake in Westin Building
November 2nd, 2006 : Rich MillerDigital 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.”
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Data Center Outages Bring Headaches, Headlines
August 15th, 2006 : Rich MillerJuly 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:
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Quincy: New ‘Power Center’ for Tech Giants
July 10th, 2006 : Rich MillerPower 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.
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Yahoo Picks Wenatchee for Wash. State Site
February 10th, 2006 : Rich MillerYahoo! 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.”
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