SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A Puerto Rican mayor says husband-and-wife pop stars Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony hope to transform his northeast coastal city into the Hollywood of the Caribbean.

Fajardo Mayor Anibal Melendez said Thursday that the singer-actors — both born in New York to Puerto Rican families — want to build a state-of-the-art soundstage in Fajardo to attract more A-list movies and TV shows to the U.S. island.

Melendez says the proposal for Fajardo is still in its infancy. But he said Lopez and Anthony voiced “a lot of enthusiasm” for the project when he met with them recently in Miami.

Publicists for the couple decline comment.

In 2006, Lopez and Anthony teamed up for a movie on Puerto Rican salsa legend Hector Lavoe.

[google.com]

When the National Security Agency (NSA) announced plans for a massive $1 billion data center in Utah last year, it got the full attention of the data center construction community. After whittling down a large list of interested vendors, a final award of the contract to build the facility is approaching.

The Federal Business Opportunities web site lists 366 contractors on its initial ”interested vendors list.” Several “vendor days” were held to outline the scope of the project. Last April the construction bidders list was cut to five, and a final award announcement is expected in September.

The Army Corps of Engineers has outlined the rough parameters of the project, including a 30-megawatt first phase featuring 100,000 square feet of data center space and 900,00 square feet for technical support and administrative space.

The estimated costs for this 1 million square foot facility now range from $1 billion to $1.9 billion. Construction has been broken into three phases, with the first phase resulting in a data center with a 30 megawatt technical load, and including modular structural components. The 2010 defense budget describes the project as “required to provide a 30MW technical load data center and infrastructure for 65MW technical load data center capacity.”

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[datacenterknowledge.com]

Developer Paul McKee’s $14.3 million project to renovate the historic Clemens House in north St. Louis into senior housing received approval for up to $10 million tax-exempt bonds from the state.

At its meeting last week, the Missouri Housing Development Commission approved the bonds, which will be sold in late October or early November so construction can start by the end of the year, said Bill Ulm, the commission’s director of rental production.

Another set of permanent 30-year bonds for up to $100 million will be sold after the project’s completion, he said.

The 24-month project will create 30 construction jobs and turn the decaying 140-year-old mansion on Cass Avenue into 49 units for seniors as well as a museum.

The Clemens House project is part of McKee’s larger $8.1 billion planned redevelopment of north St. Louis.

A judge’s ruling last month striking down a St. Louis ordinance that authorized the city’s $390 million financial package for the Northside project has no impact on the bonds approved Friday, Ulm said.

“Clemens House is an important project for the city of St. Louis,” he said. “We believe the way it’s structured, it will be financially feasible.”

McKee wants to partner with homebuilders and other developers on the 1,500-acre proposal to build up to 4.5 million square feet of office space, 1 million square feet of retail space, 2,200 new single-family homes and 7,800 apartments over the next two decades in north St. Louis. McKee has said he isn’t walking away from the project and is seeking a retrial, but the development’s future is clouded without a financial package from the city.

Also at last week’s Missouri Housing Development Commission meeting, State Treasurer Clint Zweifel’s proposal to devote $127 million — or a third of the state and federal funding — on housing for the homeless and mentally ill was rejected. But the commission signed off on a modified version of the plan that calls for two housing developments within fiscal 2011 for the mentally ill and homeless, as well as the physically disabled and foster children.

[stlouis.bizjournals.com]

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.”

[atlanta.bizjournals.com]

PITTSBURGH-Healthcare Trust of America, Inc. (HTA) is acquiring the West Penn Allegheny Building here for $41.34 million. The Allegheny General Hospital (AGH) is a current tenant, taking 31,000-square feet, however it intends to occupy 100% of the property. HTA is a non-traded real estate investment trust which specifically targets medical office and healthcare-related assets.

AGH holds a 15-year master lease for the entirety of the six-story class A office. Spanning 228,870 square feet, the building was constructed circa-2003 for multiple tenants. The AGH is a 724-bed hospital located roughly one-mile from the West Penn Allegheny Building.

“This is an opportunity to acquire a well-located, long-term stabilized asset that will be integral to AGH’s corporate operations,” says Mark D. Engstrom, EVP of acquisition for HTA, in a statement. The close of the purchase is dependent upon “satisfaction” of a number of unnamed conditions, says Scottsdale, AZ-based HTA. There lease rates are not quoted by HTA, but Cushman & Wakefield’s 2Q10 market report notes office rates in the low-20s per square foot. HTA did not respond to GlobeSt.com inquiries by deadline.

[globest.com]

Foster City-based Mid-Peninsula Housing started construction today on Fair Oaks Plaza, a $37.6 million senior housing development in Sunnyvale that is being partly bankrolled through an investment by Google.

The project at 660 S. Fair Oaks Ave. will consist of 124 affordable rental homes for low and very low-income seniors. The development was funded through a wide range of public and private funding sources including Google, which invested $19 million through the purchase of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits.

The tax credits are being syndicated and managed by Union Bank. Fair Oaks Plaza is located eight miles from Google’s headquarters.

The project marks Google’s first investment in affordable housing.

“Google recognizes the challenges associated with developing affordable housing in California and is proud to help meet this need by providing financing for some of the region’s developers,” said Brent Callinicos, Vice President and Treasurer of Google.

The development is expected to open in summer 2011.

The community will offer a full range of services and is located next to a County medical clinic. It is within a half mile of the Sunnyvale Senior Center, grocery stores, a pharmacy, a public park and multiple bus lines. Amenities include a landscaped courtyards, a fitness center and a community center with a computer lab, a lounge and a kitchen.

“Mid-Pen is proud to be the recipient of Google’s first investment in affordable housing.” said Matthew Franklin, president of Mid-Peninsula Housing. “We were founded by David Packard and other Silicon Valley pioneers forty years ago. We are grateful that today’s leading entrepreneurs like Google continue to support our work and we applaud their vision to invest in their region by financing high-quality affordable housing like Fair Oaks Plaza.”

Additional financing for the $37.6 million development was provided by the City of Sunnyvale, Housing Authority of Santa Clara County, California Department of Housing and Community Development, County of Santa Clara Department of Mental Health, CalHFA –Mental Health Services Act and Federal Stimulus Funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

[sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com]

Sisters of Mercy Health System officially launched its new $60 million data center in Washington, Mo., today.

The health-care system broke ground on the 42,500-square-foot center in April 2008 in the Heidmann Industrial Park on Vossbrink Drive near Highway 100 in Washington.

Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, other state and local officials, and Mercy executives attended an opening ceremony and open house at the new center at 2 p.m. today.

David Shaw, Mercy’s executive director of data center services, heads the new data center and said the recognition was prompted by the importance of the facility in hosting the electronic medical records across Sisters of Mercy Health System’s 28 hospitals, outpatient facilities and more than 1,300 physician practices in Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma.

“We built this very resilient facility to ensure all that medical information is secure, as it relates to HIPPA, and also is available to the medical staff,” Shaw said. HIPPA refers to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 that protects the privacy of an individual’s health information.

Plans for the data center were announced in early 2008. The health system said the need for a new data center to replace an existing Mercy center in Sunset Hills became apparent while working on the system’s electronic health records initiative, an ongoing $500 million project to integrate information systems at all of Mercy’s hospitals and clinics.

The Washington, Mo., data center will host all of Mercy’s electronic medical records and related business systems. The Sunset Hills location will remain as the main business office for Mercy Technology Services, formerly called Mercy Information Services Division, and also will be the backup for the Washington data center, Shaw said.

The location in Washington, Mo., was selected from 20 sites across the country based on the availability of alternate power sources, distance from earthquake fault lines, soil conditions and proximity to other Mercy operations, the health system said.

The data center’s core network could transfer the entire contents of the Library of Congress in 6.5 seconds. The center was built to withstand an F2 tornado. Power, cooling and network connections are fully duplicated, and it can operate 72 hours in a power outage.

VESDA (very early smoke detection apparatus) pipes run throughout the data center. The center uses 2 million feet (nearly 400 miles) of fiber optic cable, enough to reach from St. Louis to Milwaukee, the health system said.

The new 24/7 data center is staffed by about 30 IT and facility engineering personnel, including five new hires, Shaw said.

Arcturis is the architect for the data center, and S.M. Wilson & Co. is the general contractor.

Chesterfield, Mo.-based Sisters of Mercy Health System is the eighth-largest Catholic health-care system in the U.S. In June, Mercy agreed to sell its Mercy Health Plans to publicly held Coventry Health Care Inc. of Bethesda, Md., for an undisclosed amount.

[houston.bizjournals.com]

Construction will begin next month on a large senior care facility planned for central Fishers.

Bloomington-based CarDon and Associates is developing the 108-bed facility, which will offer skilled nursing, assisted living and memory care, on a 33-acre site on the northeast corner of the Cumberland Road and the 116th Street intersection, just behind a Chase bank.

CarDon hopes the $19.35 million facility will be open by January 2012, Chief Operating Officer Connie Brewer said in an e-mail.

The company plans to build a second phase that could include independent living and medical office space.

The market will dictate when the next phase would be built, but it could cost between $20 million and $40 million, Brewer said.

At least two other senior care projects are under way in Fishers.

Construction on a nursing home on Allisonville Road between Eller Road and 106th Street is nearing completion. Fishers approved zoning earlier this year for an assisted living facility that would cater to older patients with dementia. That facility will be located on the north side of 116th Street, about a half-mile west of Brooks School Road.

[indystar.com]

Five minutes from the main headquarters of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, employees of the Florida law-enforcement agency can, at no cost to them, swiftly see a doctor in a new medical center equipped with gun lockers and space to doff boots and bullet-proof vests.

If the physician prescribes medicine, an officer can leave with drug in hand.

The two-month-old West Palm Beach medical office, operated and staffed by health insurer Cigna Corp. (CI) solely for the sheriff’s department’s 4,100 employees, reflects a growing interest among employers in improving employee access to health care and offering services aimed at improving overall health and productivity.

Interest in such facilities may intensify as some 32 million uninsured Americans are poised to gain coverage in the next few years under the new health overhaul, exacerbating what many experts see as a growing U.S. physician shortage that can hinder access to good medical care and lengthen waits to see a doctor.

“I would expect the primary-care shortage to worsen,” said Thomas Richards, Cigna’s senior vice president for U.S. products and leader of the insurer’s implementation of the health overhaul law. In response, some large employers are considering putting clinics on site, according to Richards.

“I think that trend will grow as employers look at employees needing to take time off to sit and wait for a doctor,” he said.

Cigna runs 22 employer health centers ranging in services from health-coaching to primary care, and provides a workplace health center for its own employees.

Drug-store chain Walgreen Co. (WAG), the industry leader in workplace health services after buying the two largest site operators in 2008, runs some 380 centers that vary in scope from fitness centers to pharmacies to nurse-practitioner or physician care. More than half are staffed by physicians, according to Peter Hotz, group vice president for Walgreen’s health and wellness division.

While the recession dampened growth following the purchases, in the last 12 months “we’ve seen demand pick up quite a bit because companies realize that these services save them money, both in the short term and in the long term,” Hotz said. Walgreen has seen growth across the board, he said, including a healthy uptick in physician-directed sites.

Walgreen, with such workplace health-center clients as Walt Disney Co. (DIS) and Toyota Motor Corp. (TM), expects to see steady, double-digit percentage growth in the number of sites, Hotz told Dow Jones Newswires.

“There is a concern about the shortage of primary-care physicians,” he said.

A Walgreen spokesman cited a 2008 Fuld & Co. research paper that estimated onsite clinics then served 4% of people under age 65 in the U.S., and predicted they will serve more than 10% of that population by 2015. Fuld reported that 24 vendors then were managing some 2,200 clinics for 1,200 clients, and said such centers can cut employers’ health costs.

Walgreen clients pay for the costs of running the facilities, plus a management fee, so there’s no incentive for doctors to see a certain number of patients. That aligns the interests of the facility with employers, Hotz said. Some clients provide health-center access for dependents as well as employees.

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[online.wsj.com]

Microsoft is to build another large data center, this time in Virginia, despite scaling back plans for an earlier facility in Iowa.

Microsoft will spend US$499 million to build a data center in Mecklenburg County in Southern Virginia, the state’s Governor Bob McDonnell announced in a statement Friday. About 50 people will work at the facility.

McDonnell said Virginia beat out North Carolina and Texas for the deal.

The facility will be one of Microsoft’s Generation 4 data centers, meaning it will be built primarily with containers filled with servers. Microsoft first described its Generation 4 data centers in 2008, saying the modular setup would allow for energy efficiency, cost savings and quick deployment.

The Governor’s Opportunity Fund will provide a $2.1 million grant to “assist” the county with the project. Key to Microsoft’s decision to choose Virginia were Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative’s fiber network and Dominion Virginia Power’s competitively priced, clean energy supply, according to McDonnell’s statement.

Microsoft did not reply to a request for further details.

In 2008 Microsoft unveiled plans for a data center in Iowa that would cost $500 million to build and employ a reported 50 to 75 people with annual salaries of $70,000. In June it said it would now spend $100 million on the facility instead, and employ 25 people with average wages of $31.04 per hour.

Microsoft has other large data centers in Chicago; San Antonio, Texas; Quincy, Washington; and Dublin, Ireland. They support what Microsoft hopes will be a growing online services business, including hosted enterprise applications and its Azure cloud development platform.

[pcworld.com]