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Ask.com Plans Washington St. Data CenterSearch engine Ask.com has signed a lease for a data center in an existing building in Moses Lake, Washington, according to John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who said the company declined to name the building or specify the size of the data center. Ask.com's decision continues the data center building boom in central Washington State, where four other major projects are already underway. Microsoft has announced plans for a huge data center complex in Quincy, as has Intuit. Meanwhile, Yahoo and Sabey Corp. are starting projects in nearby Wenatchee.
StarGate Announces Chicago FacilityHosting provider Stargate Holdings Corp. today announced that it will open an 86,000 square-foot Tier III data center in the suburbs of Chicago, which it expects to be will be fully operational by August 2007. The company said the new facility will hold up 2,200 cabinets, with a hot-aisle containment system for temperature control that will allow it to host high-density blade server installations. "This new data center has been specifically designed to give IT managers the peace of mind they demand and expect with regard to co-location, hosting and disaster recovery services," said G. Gary Chaffin, CEO of Stargate. The company's press release said it is "currently offering discounts to anchor tenants, reserving space prior to March 31st, 2007." Stargate is best known as an ICANN-accredited domain registrar, but also offers hosting and colocation services. Its current facility is located in Napierville, Illinois.
Switch & Data Completes IPOColocation provider Switch & Data Inc. went public yesterday with an IPO that raised about $200 million. The company's shares are trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol SDXC. Switch & Data sold 11.7 million shares at $17 each, somewhat higher than the previously reported range of $14 to $16. Shares immediately moved higher, briefly trading as high as $22 a share before closing at $19.00. The first-day pop, while nothing like the Netscape days, reflects investor interest in the data center sector after a strong showing in 2006. Nine million of the shares were sold by the Company and 2,666,667 shares were being offered by stockholders. According to an amended Form S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the offering represents a 35 percent stake in Switch & Data. Underwriters, which include Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. and Jefferies & Co. Inc., have the option to buy up to 1.8 million shares more to cover overallotments.
EMC To Sell Some VMware Shares in IPOEMC Corporation (EMC) will sell approximately 10% of VMware through an IPO of newly issued VMware stock. EMC will hang onto the remaining 90% of VMware shares, and "has no intention of spinning out or otherwise divesting this ownership interest." VMware is the global leader in software for virtualization, the hot trend in managing complex data center infrastructures. The IPO will allow EMC to benefit from the boom in virtualization, but still retain tight control of VMware. The company also intends to use VMware stock options as as hook to attract technical talent.
VeriSign Plans Huge Infrastructure UpgradeVeriSign, Inc. (VRSN), which manages the domain name system, plans a $100 million infrastructure upgrade to manage explosive growth in Internet traffic. The initiative, named Project Titan, will include the construction of new data centers, upgrades to existing equipment, and leasing space in dozens of third-party facilities around the world. VeriSign said it intends to "expand and diversify the capacity of its global Internet infrastructure by ten times by the year 2010." Named Project Titan, the initiative’s aim is to allow VeriSign’s infrastructure to scale along with the explosive surge in traffic from e-commerce, social networking and Internet-enabled wireless devices. The upgrades are also designed to enhance the DNS system's protection against cyber attacks similar to Tuesday's denial of service attack against several root servers. "With the emergence of consumer-driven services and the surge in web-ready wireless devices, the Internet we know today is radically different than the one we knew just five years ago," said Stratton Sclavos, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of VeriSign. "We must make sure that VeriSign’s infrastructure is ready to support a new era of the Internet, the Any Era, where billions of users demand anywhere, anytime, any device access to communications, information and entertainment." Over the next three years, VeriSign will increase its daily Domain Name System (DNS) query capacity from 400 billion queries a day to over 4 trillion queries a day and will scale its resolution systems to increase their bandwidth from 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) to greater than 200 Gbps. "VeriSign is building additional network operations centers in the United States and Europe to efficiently manage and provide increased redundancy for Internet traffic," the company said in a press release. "These sites will expand VeriSign’s data center capacity and diversify its locations to improve Internet traffic management and counter region-specific cyber attacks and threats."
FedEx Building Data Center in ColoradoFederal Express is building a 113,000 square foot data center in Colorado Springs, according to the Rocky Mountain Gazette. The new facility at 250 Spectrum Loop in the Northgate business park will be nearly twice the size of the current FedEx data center at 5550 Tech Center Drive, which is owned by Lexington Realty Trust and leased to FedEx. The Tech Center Drive site is said to already on the market for lease and has been offered to other companies that are considering opening data centers The new FedEx center will be less than a mile from a 175,000-square-foot center Progressive Corp. center opened last year. Local economic development officials are marketing Colorado Springs as a destination for corporate data centers. "The FedEx project confirms that our strategy is working," said said David White, vice president of the Colorado Springs Economic Development Corporation. "We should see more of these kinds of investments in the near future."
Equinix to Buy Its San Jose FacilityData center service provider Equinix, Inc. (EQIX) today announced an agreement to acquire its flagship Silicon Valley property for $65.0 million. The company said the purchase allows it to control the property and gives Equinix the option of building additional data centers on th site. Equinix’s flagship Internet Business Exchange center in San Jose is one of four data centers the company operates in Silicon Valley.The company will make a $6.5 million deposit and finance the remainder of the purchase price. The deal will close sometime before November 2007. "The acquisition will enable us to gain long-term control of this strategic IBX center," said Peter Van Camp, the chairman and CEO of Equinix, who noted that the company acquired its Washington D.C. data center campus last year with similar motivations. "This deal may provide us with greater options in potentially expanding our IBX footprint in this important market to meet the growing demand for our colocation and network interconnectivity services."
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Posted by Rich Miller 
February 09, 2007 |