“The county now claims about 40 centers comprising roughly 4 million square feet of space — equivalent to 22 Wal-Mart Supercenters,” the Post reports. ” Another 800,000 square feet are either planned or being built. Loudoun officials said they expect 6.5 million square feet in data centers by 2021. ‘We don’t really see any end in sight,’ said Buddy Rizer, a business development officer at Loudoun County’s economic development office.”

Ashburn is home to a former UUNet facility that was a key hub in MAE-East, the Internet’s first major interconnection point. Equinix built its first data center n Ashburn in 1998, providing a “carrier-neutral” facility where companies could gain access to Internet backbones operated by UUNet and AT&T. That first Ashburn site, known as DC1, quickly become the Web’s busiest meeting place. Equinix filled DC1 and has built four additional data centers in Ashburn spanning nearly 500,000 square feet of space.

The most recent expansions in Ashburn include projects for Sabey Data Centers and expansions by Equinix and DuPont Fabros Technology.

In January 2010 Sabey announced plans to  partner with National Real Estate Advisors (NREA) to form a new venture that will expand Sabey’s data center operations beyond its core market in the Pacific northwest. NREA is a real estate investment management and advisory firm owned by National Electrical Benefit Fund (NEBF), a multi-billion dollar pension plan that provides retirement benefits to employees in the electrical industry.

The Tysons East properties are  within walking distance of the future Silver Line’s Tyson’s East Metrorail Station, which is planned for delivery in 2013. “We believe Tyson’s East will be a great addition to the BIT portfolio,” says Kevin McCarthy, President of PNC Realty Investors.  “The properties are currently 98 percent leased with no significant lease turnover until 2014.”

The cages housing customer equipment inside an Equinix data center.

Colocation and interconnection specialist Equinix will build a 10th International Business Exchange (IBX) data center at its campus in Ashburn, Virginia, the company said today. The company said its DC10 will provide 77,000 square feet of customer floor space, built out in multiple phases.

The new data center will be built by Digital Realty Trust (DLR), the real estate investment trust that owns several of Equinix’s existing facilities. The facility is scheduled to open in early 2012, with the first phase is expected to cost $34 million in expansion capital, which is already reflected in the company’s guidance.

Equinix said DC10 will focus on offer Business Suites, a service targeting Equinix customers that may require larger data center footprints but still need the connectivity and cross-connects from an IBX peering center. Equinix has previously offered Business Suites in some markets in Europe.

‘Strategic Importance’ of Ashburn

“As the most interconnected site on the East Coast, the Ashburn campus has long been a location of strategic importance to us,” said Charles Meyers, president of the Americas for Equinix. “With strong demand for Platform Equinix in this market, we continue to invest in the D.C. metro area to support the requirements of our expanding customer base.”

The Equinix Ashburn campus includes more than 620,000 square feet of data center space. The campus is one of the Internet’s busiest intersections, managing digital traffic flow between the nearly 200 networks that meet inside the buildings. The campus is a strategic focal point for Equinix, which has built a prosperous business helping companies avert Internet traffic jams.

Equinix also announced the availability of its Business Continuity Services in Milan, Italy, which is a leading European finance and technology hub. In addition to Milan, Equinix offers Business Continuity services in Frankfurt, Munich, Dusseldorf, Hong Kong, and New York.

Equinix also reported ts second quarter earnings after the market close Wednesday. Revenues were $394.9 million for the second quarter, a 9% increase over the previous quarter and a 33% increase over the same quarter last year. Recurring revenues, consisting primarily of colocation, interconnection and managed services were $376.5 million for the second quarter, a 9% increase over the previous quarter and a 33% increase over the same quarter last year. Non-recurring revenues were $18.4 million in the quarter.

ByteGrid a privately held company headquartered in Northern Virginia. It has teamed with Altpoint Capital Partners, a New York based private equity firm that is backing ByteGrid’s effort to build a carrier-neutral wholesale data center platform across multiple geographic markets.

“We are pleased to acquire a data center with such a stellar reputation and a history of pristine operations in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan data center market,” said Kenneth Parent, ByteGrid’s CEO. “With Altpoint’s partnership and support, we plan to acquire similar high-quality facilities in additional metropolitan markets to provide scalable and interconnected solutions to our customers.”

Includes Modular Option
The Silver Springs data center will feature a flexible design approach that offers customers the option of traditional raised-floor space or modular data centers. ByteGrid can accommodate either design approach at the 214,000 square foot data center.

ByteGrid has up to 2.4 megawatts of critical power available for immediate lease, with power densities ranging from 50 to 150 watts per square foot. The company intends to expand the data centers’ available power over time. The facility is served by multiple Tier 1 telecommunications carriers.

ByteGrid’s leadership team includes executives with expertise spanning real estate, finance and facilities. It’s the latest example of a trend in which executive teams with industry experience team with capital partners to form new data center companies.

“With its efficient, flexible and resilient design, this facility is a prime example of the quality of data center we will provide to our customers to meet their IT infrastructure outsourcing, business continuity, and disaster recovery needs,” said Manny Mencia, ByteGrid’s President, who has over 25 years of experience in senior telecommunications, data center and IT services roles.

A look at the interior of one of the RagingWire data centers in Sacramento. The company has acquired a new data center in northern Virginia.

RagingWire Enterprise Solutions has gone national. The Sacramento, Calif.-based colocation provider has acquired a data center building in Northern Virginia, providing the company with a data center footprint on both coasts of the U.S. RagingWire did not identify the location of the new facility.

The new facility is a 140,000 square foot building that includes more than 70,000 square feet of raised floor space. With power capacity of 14.4 megawatts, it can support power densities of up to 250 watts per square foot. The Virginia sata center boosts RagingWire’s total available data center space to 610,000 square feet nationally.

“We’ve experienced incredible demand from our clients for more capacity and numerous requests for a RagingWire data center on the East Coast,” said Yatish Mishra, president and CEO of RagingWire. “This is an exciting milestone for the company to expand to a national footprint to support our large enterprise, e-commerce, cloud, and social media clients.”

Now Has Three Data Centers

RagingWire currently operates a 220,000 square foot data center, and has just completed a new 250,000 square foot data center nearby. In February the company secured $75 million in credit facilities, saying it would help fund expansion at “other sites under consideration.”

With the new site, RagingWire joins a growing number of colocation providers expanding their infrastructure to include facilities on both coasts. This East-West footprint is desirable for disaster recovery and for supporting national and global audiences.

“Any company with high profile clientele has to consider expanding its footprint in order to extend the redundancy and access points to those customers,” said Antonio Piraino, from Tier 1 Research. “RagingWire is positioning itself to be a worthy national contender with this move.”

RagingWire becomes the fourth company in the last week to initiate a data center expansion in northern Virginia, following announcements of land purchases by Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros, and the announcement that PAETEC has acquired a facility in McLean.

The PAETEC facility in McLean, which is planned to open at the end of 2011, is the latest in a series of announcements of new data center supply for the northern Virginia market, which is one of the most active in the country. CoreSite and Latisys are each building out new data center space, and this week both Digital Realty Trust and DuPont Fabros said they had purchased additional property in Ashburn to support more data centers.

“We selected this location specifically to meet the growing needs of the mid-Atlantic businesses as well as to support government applications,” said Sanjay Hiranandani, PAETEC’s chief technology officer. “We expect this data center to be considered one of the premier centers on the East Coast. Additionally, our fiber and fixed wireless infrastructure ensure that we can deliver the cloud-based services to end users virtually anywhere in the country at Gigabit and higher speeds.”

The center continues PAETEC’s ongoing geographic expansion of its data center network. With the addition of McLean, PAETEC will have key data center facilities in Andover, Mass.; Bethlehem and Conshohocken, Pa.; Milwaukee, Houston, Phoenix, and Richmond, Va., augmenting its footprint of more than 100 physical colocation facilities nationwide. PAETEC says it operates 1.4 million square feet of data center space.

The server hall of a data center operated by CoreSite, which is expanding its data center space in northern Virginia.

Data center builders continue to bring new capacity online in the active northern Virginia market. Last week both CoreSite Realty and Latisys announced projects to expand their data center operations in Reston and Ashburn, respectively. The expansions are among a number of new projects will provide a welcome supply of data center space in a  market where demand continues to exceed supply.

In its fourth quarter earnings, CoreSite (COR) said that it has commenced construction on 52,286 square feet of  data center space at its 12100 Sunrise Valley Drive facility in Reston. The company said it will invest an estimated $30.5 million in the expansion, and expects to complete the space in phases during the second and third quarters of 2011.

The expansion space has an anchor tenant, managed hosting provider ServInt, which said last week that it has leased half a megawatt of capacity in the  expansion space.  “This significant expansion of our data center resources will help us ensure ample capacity for ongoing and future growth,” said ServInt CTO Matthew Loschert. “We selected CoreSite’s Reston facility for our expansion because it provides best-of-breed connectivity, energy efficiency, power redundancy and environmental sustainability. We consider it to be the best-positioned data center in Northern Virginia.”

Meanwhile, Latisys has announced a significant expansion to its Ashburn, Virginia data center campus that includes 14 megawatts of additional power and 26,000 square feet of new, available raised floor space. Latisys, which provides managed hosting and colocation services, says it is new space can scale to an average of 220 watts per square foot and also tie customer infrastructure seamlessly into the company’s disaster recovery solutions.

“We continue to see customers express the need to ensure built-in expansion capacity to meet their own internal growth while also retaining the flexibility to keep pace with the evolution of compute, storage and network technologies” said David Haskell, Washington, D.C. Regional Sales Director, Latisys. “By implementing high density power and cooling capacity, and delivering a flexible data center-as-a-service offering to enable larger private and public sector entities to meet evolving IT requirements, customers can eliminate scalability and reliability issues.”

“This significant expansion of our data center resources will help us ensure ample capacity for ongoing and future growth,” said ServInt CTO Matthew Loschert. “We selected CoreSite’s Reston facility for our expansion because it provides best-of-breed connectivity, energy efficiency, power redundancy and environmental sustainability. We consider it to be the best-positioned data center in Northern Virginia.”

CoreSite Realty (COR) operates 11 data centers in seven key U.S. economic centers.

“It is gratifying to expand the data center resources of an important customer like ServInt in an established CoreSite market,” said David Dunn, CoreSite Senior Vice President of Strategy and Marketing. “We believe our facility is well suited to meet the demanding hosting requirements of ServInt’s wide range of customers.”

Grubb & Ellis Associate Vice President David Horowitz and Senior Vice President William Moser, both in the Company’s National Data Center Practice, represented ServInt in this leasing transaction.

“Working with a large, national developer creates efficiencies for companies with a presence in multiple markets,” said Grubb & Ellis’ Horowitz. “For that reason, it was ServInt’s preference and our recommendation to work with CoreSite in this transaction.  We’re excited we were able to help expand this relationship, and we look forward to working together in the future as ServInt continues to grow.”

An aerial view of construction at a DuPont Fabros data center in northern Virginia. Data center construction is likely to remain busy in the area.

The data center building boom in northern Virginia appears likely to continue, as Grubb & Ellis reports that several new construction projects may be in the works.

“Virginia has seen increasing design-build interest from the user community, with a number of operators rumored to be shopping for land to accommodate future data center campuses,” writes Bill Moser of Grubb & Ellis on the company’s Data Center Practice blog. “Both DLR (Digital Realty Trust) and DBT Development are rumored to be moving forward with design-build solutions in Ashburn for single tenant transactions of 150,000 square feet.”

Key Data Center Hub
Northern Virginia is one of the strongest data center markets, due to its historic status as a key intersection for communications networks and proximity to Washington, D.C. These factors combine to make northern Virginia a favored data center location for large Internet companies and government agencies.

In the past two years, most of the wholesale data center space coming online in northern Virginia has pre-leased, meaning the buildings have signed tenants before they open their doors. Grubb & Ellis estimates that there is currently demand for 40 to 70 megawatts of wholesale space in northern Virginia, with only 40 megawatts of new inventory scheduled to be brought to market in 2011.

That’s why companies are contemplating more new construction. Digital Realty has already built a cluster of data centers on its Ashburn campus, and last year acquired several more properties nearby. DBT has experience in the data center sector from a project in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

LeaseWeb, part of the Ocom group of internet companies, offers dedicated servers, colocation and tailored infrastructure solutions for enterprise customers. Based in the Netherlands, LeaseWeb was founded in 1997 by Zwinkels and Laurens Rosenthal while they were college students running the business on a single server in an attic. The company now has 30,000 customer servers spread throughout five data center locations in Amsterdam and Brussels and peers with more than 20 internet exchanges in Europe and the U.S.

Ocom also owns Evoswitch, which operates a climate-neutral data center in Amsterdam that supports operations for Wikipedia, Logica, NTT and Codemasters.

“The United States is one of the most competitive hosting markets in the world,” Zwinkels said. “We expect the new LeaseWeb datacenter to be very attractive to our many global customers seeking the same hosting services and connectivity in the United States as they receive in Europe.

“There is a large market for the quality and value LeaseWeb offers its customers,” Zwinkels added. “We plan to increase our share of the worldwide hosting marketplace, by offering LeaseWeb customers high value data infrastructure options, and technically advanced hosting products and services to meet client needs.”