Rackspace Expands with Ashburn Data Center

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Rackspace has leased space in this DuPont Fabros data center facility in Virginia.

Rackspace Hosting (RAX) will expand its data center network with an additional facility in northern Virginia, the company announced today. Rackspace will lease 11,000 square feet of raised floor space in a huge data center in Ashburn operated by DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT). Rackspace expects the new space to come online in July 2009. This will be Rackspace's second facility in northern Virginia, where it already operates a data center in Herndon.

The expansion is needed because Rackspace is running out of space in its primary hosting facility, a 144,000 square foot data center near Dallas. The company considered building additional data center space in its new headquarters facility in a former shopping center in San Antonio, but later indicated that it believed it could save money by buying or leasing instead. In announcing the new location, Rackspace affirmed that the lease "will enable it to serve customer demand more quickly and cost effectively than if Rackspace built its own facility."

"DuPont Fabros offers some of the leading data center facilities in the country with world-class operational and management practices," said Randy Smith, director of real estate for Rackspace Hosting. "We chose to work with them for their unique ability to design a data center infrastructure that increases operational efficiencies and ultimate reliability for our customers. By leaving the infrastructure management to DuPont Fabros, we can be much more flexible and redeploy some resources so we can focus on continually delivering our customers Fanatical Support.”

"Our data center philosophy is to design and develop highly efficient data centers with increased power densities and high reliability that provide an optimized solution for our tenants," said Hossein Fateh, chief executive officer, DuPont Fabros Technology. "As the leader in the hosting space, Rackspace is committed to providing its customers with an excellent service experience and we believe a state-of-the-art data center is the foundation to a great customer experience."

Rackspace currently operates about 130,000 square feet of data center space in eight data centers in San Antonio, Texas; Grapevine, Texas; Herndon, Virginia; London and Hong Kong.