BlackSwan Zine

When Australian firm WesTrac needed to expand its data center capacity quickly, the company bought the equivalent of a Band-Aid for its server needs: A containerized data center. The company, which supplies Caterpillar brand heavy-machinery to Australian customers and others, found itself with too little data center to meet the needs of its latest IT project.

One Partner’s advice on your new data center and where you better not build it.

Sentinel Data Centers and Russo Development have begun construction on a large multi-tenant data center facility in Somerset, New Jersey, the companies announced today. The companies have acquired a 22.5 acre site with an existing 230,000 square foot single-story structure, expandable to 330,000 square feet.

A national data center provider has signed a long-term lease for an 81,600-square-foot flex building to be located in the Chicago suburb of Mt. Prospect. Ned Franke, Alex Smith and Jordan Rovito of Cushman & Wakefield completed the transaction on behalf of the building’s owner, First Industrial Realty Trust, Inc.

The city of Cheyenne is one of three finalists for a $750-million-plus computer data center that would be the largest in the Rocky Mountain region, said Cheyenne LEADS President Randy Bruns. The fact that Cheyenne even made the shortlist for the data center indicates that the city is already reaping economic dividends from luring in the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s new supercomputing center.

Telecommunications provider Qwest Communications (www.qwest.com) announced on Monday it has acquired a data center in northern Virginia that will become the company’s 17th CyberCenter hosting data center, according to a report by Data center Knowledge.

The boxy three-story building at 5851 Westside Avenue in North Bergen, N.J., attracts as much attention from passing motorists as a cornfield by the side of an interstate in Iowa. No signs proclaim its occupant, and its generic off-white facade and empty parking lot offer few clues as to what prompted developers to rehab the 163,000-square-foot structure in 2008, after it had sat vacant for about a decade.

Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE:DLR), the world’s largest wholesale datacenter provider, has completed a Turn-Key Datacenter[R] lease agreement with Terremark Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:TMRK), a leading global provider of managed IT infrastructure services.

Two bills with bipartisan support have been introduced in the Washington Legislature that could potentially jump-start data center construction activity in the state and create thousands of jobs.

Social networking giant Facebook announced it is building its first custom data center, a $180 million facility in Oregon that will help the company keep pace with its 350 million – and growing – users worldwide.