Criticon Plans Virginia Data Center

Criticon, a newly-formed developer of mission-critical facilities, will invest $115 million in its first data center, a planned 150,000 square foot colocation facility in Harrisonburg, Va. Criticon will redevelop the former Tyco Building at 1175 N. Main Street in Harrisonburg, expanding the facility by 40,000 square feet.

“Harrisonburg is the right fit for Criticon’s first co-location data center,” said Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine. “The area’s university, technology savvy workforce, and multiple fiber carriers meet all the company’s needs. Criticon’s significant investment to convert the former Tyco Building and create new, high paying technology jobs will broaden the corporate base in Harrisonburg and the region.” The new data center is expected to create 25 new jobs paying an average $80,000 salary.

Terremark Gets $27M for Expansion

Terremark Worldwide, Inc. (TWW) has obtained $27.25 million in financing from Credit Suisse to buy data centers in Silicon Valley and the Washington, D.C. market and complete the build-out of its current Silicon Valley facility, the company announced today. Under terms of the deal, Credit Suisse will purchase the two properties and lease them to Terremark, while providing the company with a $13.25 in financing in the form of a lease commitment. Terremark will later have the option to buy the properties from Credit Suisse at the original purchase price plus accrued interest.

“We are excited to have this financing in place, which will allow us to move forward with our expansion strategy and leverage the significant customer demand we are seeing in these two markets,” said Manuel D. Medina, Chairman and CEO of Terremark Worldwide, Inc. “With this funding we can begin contracting with both new and current customers for the two facilities, which will provide a solid foundation to lower our cost of capital as we secure the balance of the financing.”

Equinix Raises Additional $40M

Equinix, Inc. (EQIX) has borrowed an additional $40 million to finance the expansion of its Washington, D.C. area data center campus, following through on a financing plan first announced last September. Equinix shares were down $2.73 to $72.65 in mid-morning trading on Wall Street.

Equinix is increasing the existing mortgage on its Washington, D.C. area campus from $60 million to $100 million, on the same terms as the initial mortgage, which is a fixed rate of 8% and a 20-year term. Equinix weill use the borrowing to fund its expansion strategy for the D.C. area. Equinix is building out an existing shell on the campus and intends to open the new facility this month. The new data center will add approximately 100,000 gross square feet and increase sellable cabinets by 1,700 to meet increasing demand in the Washington, D.C. area.

Savvis Will Build 4 New Data Centers

Savvis (SVVS) today announced plans to develop four new data centers to help meet customer demand for its managed hosting and colocation services. The new facilities will be located in Atlanta, New York, Washington, DC and Santa Clara, Calif., and should be open to customers in the fourth quarter of 2007.

The announcement comes on the same day that Savvis announced the sale of its content distribution network to Level 3 for $135 million, which provides Savvis with a financial warchest to invest in new data centers. Savvis said it anticipates spending approximately $200 million in 2007 to fully develop the four centers, and said it has executed lease agreements for each of the sites, one of which is contingent upon certain conditions expected to be met in January 2007.

“SAVVIS is focused on delivering IT infrastructure as a service and we’re committed to being a leader in this space,” said Phil Koen, SAVVIS’ Chief Executive Officer. “Our new data center facilities, opening in the fourth quarter 2007, will provide customers with state-of-the-art managed hosting and colocation services, including our industry-leading virtualized utility services.”

Homeland Security Plans 2nd Data Center

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has issued a request for information as it plans to add a new data center that will provide real-time mirroring of the operations housed at an existing 100,000 square foot data center. DHS is seeking to have the new facility be located some distance from the existing center, and preferably on a separate power grid, to allow for the department’s operations to continue in the event of a regional disaster or a blackout that takes the entire Eastern Interconnection area offline.

365 Main Expands Into Phoenix, Northern Virginia

365 Main has acquired data centers in Phoenix and northern Virginia as it continues to expand, citing strong customer demand for top-quality mission-critical facilities. The Phoenix property is a fully operational 315,000 square feet center in the Price Road tech corridor in Chandler, which the company purchased last December. The northern Virginia data center is a 145,000 square foot site on Lafayette Center Drive in Chantilly, which is expected to open for business in September.

365 Main said its choice of expansion cities was guided by customer demand and affordable power. “The demand we’re seeing is consistently coming from the enterprise sector,” said VP of marketing Miles Kelly, who said many of 365 Main’s customers at its San Francisco facility are interested in expansion space in one of the two new markets. “Phoenix has become well-recognized as a prime disaster recovery market, so our pipeline is pretty fresh,” he said.

365 Main, which also had a grand opening for its new Los Angeles data center yesterday, focused on “power-sensitive” geographic markets. Customers will pay about 4 cents a kilowatt for power at the new sites in Northern Virginia (Dominion Power) and Phoenix (Salt River Project). That’s a third of the rates at the company’s San Francisco and Los Angeles centers, said company president Chris Dolan.

“Power is the first thing everyone asks about now,” said Dolan. “It’s a major concern, so we developed a billing model that only charges customers for exactly what they use. Most companies charge a flat rate per month in a ‘use it or lose it’ structure, which usually means that the customer loses. But that’s not the way we like to do business, so we came up with a different model that is more fair to the customer.”

InterNap to Expand 11 P-NAP Centers

As expected, routing solutions provider Internap Network Services said today that it will upgrade eleven of its Private Network Access Point (P-NAP) locations to address customer’s growing capacity needs in key markets. In addition to the recent completion of its first 10 Gigabit (10G) based P-NAP re-architecture in San Jose, additional upgrades are targeted in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC.

Internap’s P-NAP infrastructure features proprietary route control software, which continuously monitors and redirects customer traffic across up to eight major backbones to optimize performance. As a result, Internap is able to offer 100 percent uptime and overcome various problems that may halt or degrade the performance of real-time Internet applications.

$80 Million Spec Project in Virginia

It’s been a while since we’ve seen startups unveiling speculative data center projects in Northern Virginia. Cokomo LLC has announced plans for a 140,000 square foot facility in Prince William County, with a projected cost of $80 million and completion date of Febraury 2008. Last week, the county approved the sale of 20 acres of land to Cokomo at Innovation, a 1,500-acre piece of land purchased by the county to pursue high-wage businesses, a strategy that has succeeded for Fairfax and Loudoun counties.

“The demand for [data center] space has ramped up quickly in the last 18 months,” James F. Coakley, the head of Cokomo, told the Washington Post. “We’re hoping the market will be there for us with a user by the time we are ready for final build-out.”