Data Center: T5 to build$75M data center
by Urvaksh Karkaria for Atlanta Business Chronicle
Data center developer T5 Partners LLC plans to build a roughly $75 million facility in metro Atlanta.
The 100,000-square-foot center would be among the five largest in the region, and include several mini data centers.
T5, which is developing two data center parks in Charlotte, is considering a dozen sites for its metro Atlanta data center, partner Jason Chartrand said.
“This is our move into expanding into the Atlanta market,” he said.
Chartrand declined to disclose where T5 is looking. Metro Atlanta’s major data center markets are Lithia Springs, Alpharetta and Gwinnett County.
Data centers, which can be as large as shopping malls, are stacked floor-to-ceiling with computer servers and other hardware that power websites, crunch data and store information. Critical to modern business and holding terabytes of sensitive information, data centers are equipped with duplicate power and network systems to ensure against blackouts.
T5, which launched in 2008, believes the Atlanta region is under-served in mega-sized data centers such as the type it’s proposing. The facility will consist of multiple data centers, each at least 10,000 square feet.
“There just hasn’t been a lot of these things being built and deployed over the past three or four years, with the way the economy’s been,” Chartrand said.
Not everyone agrees.
Metro Atlanta has more than 275,000 square feet of available data center space, said Butch Goldi, Southeast general manager at Quality Technology Services.
“[T5] is going to spend a ton of capital building it and they’re going to have to give it away,” Goldi said. “T5 would be wise to spend their money building inventory in another city. There’s plenty of space in Atlanta.”
Chartrand waves off those concerns, noting increased data center supply is likely to attract more attention to Atlanta from end users.
While the need for more data center inventory might be questionable, there is less argument about the region’s place in the industry.
Atlanta is one of the fastest-growing markets in the U.S. for data center space, in terms of build-out and demand, New York-based Tier1 Research said in November. Several firms, including E*Trade, Google, Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp., have data center operations in the region.
Metro Atlanta — relatively free of natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes — is an ideal location, since mission-critical data centers must be up and running 24/7. The region also has good fiber infrastructure and reliable and relatively inexpensive power. Atlanta’s major industry clusters — media, research and financial services — are also heavy data center users.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper Networks Inc., which develops routers, switches, and security hardware and software used in information technology networks and data centers, is said to be eyeing the region for a $100 million-plus facility where it would test equipment and software.
While demand for data centers in metro Atlanta was flat over the past two years, Quality Technology’s Goldi expects it to increase about 30 percent next year.
Demand for data centers is growing as technology allows businesses to focus on their core competencies. A greater focus on the bottom line also means companies are looking to cut operational costs by outsourcing data center work.
It’s more cost-effective to outsource data center operations that require anything less than five megawatts of power, Goldi said.
Data centers within a data center
T5’s proposed data center would be a multi-tenant facility occupied by Fortune 500 companies.
While the tenants would be under the same roof, each business would have secure and separate data center space and dedicated infrastructure, including power and fiber.
Ideally, businesses prefer to build, own and maintain their data centers for security reasons, Chartrand said. Doing so, however, can be expensive.
The proposed T5 facility would address the IT department’s security and autonomy needs, and management’s need to do it in a cost-effective manner, Chartrand said.
A data center of the size T5 is proposing would service a niche market, said Matt Searfoss, vice president and Atlanta general manager for data center operator Peak 10 Inc.
Peak 10 caters to small and midsized companies that typically require space from a single cabinet up to a few thousand square feet, Searfoss said.
“I wouldn’t think that T5 would want to get into the colocation play of carving up the data center into small pieces,” Searfoss said.
The T5 building would be designed to deliver up to 200 watts of power per square foot.
Located on about 20 acres, the data center would have redundant power supply and could include its own electric substation.
The planned data center would be designed as a Tier 3 facility, with the ability to be upgraded to a Tier 4 center — the highest level of reliability and security. A Tier 4 data center is a standalone facility with at least two power feeds from separate grids.
“We’ll add the components to the facility that will get it to Tier 4 [if the customer requests it, but it’ll be more expensive],” Chartrand said. “It’s kinda like buying a car with all the extras and four-wheel drive.”
