NTT America to Add San Jose Data Center

Fresh off the announcement of a new data center in Santa Clara, NTT America has confirmed that it will soon bring another new data center online in Silicon Valley. "We have another data center in San Jose that's about the same size as our new facility in Santa Clara," said Kazuhiro Gomi, Chief Operating Officer of NTT America. "Once that is available, we will have three data centers in the Bay area."

The new Santa Clara facility is about 15,000 square feet. Gomi wouldn't identify the data center providers in either new location, but said both expansions involve wholesale data center space in multi-tenant facilities.

Sources tell Data Center Knowledge that NTT America's Santa Clara space is in a building owned by Digital Realty Trust (DLR), while the San Jose space is at the new Fortune Data Centers facility. Fortune said earlier this year that it had signed an anchor tenant taking between 10,000 and 15,000 square feet of space within the first phase of its facility, but has not identified the tenant.

On Monday we noted the growth of Twitter as a driving factor in NTT's expansion. That's partially true, but part of a bigger story, the company said Wednesday. "Twitter is a really important customer for us," said Stephen Bloom, Vice President of Business Development for NTT America. "But there are a lot of our customers that are growing, so there's really an overall growth pattern that was driving this."

"We Keep Adding Servers"
"We've been working on the Santa Clara data center for almost a year," said Gomi. "At the time we began, no one expected that Twitter would have the kind of growth we've seen this year. Meeting this rapid growth has been a challenge for us. We've been very busy adding capacity to make sure we have enough processing power to handle their demand. We need to keep adding servers."

NTT America, the U.S. subsidiary of Japanese telecom giant NTT Communications, has had major data centers in San Jose and Sterling, Va. for many years. In late 2008 the company expanded on the East Coast with an additional 20,000 square feet of space in Ashburn, Va., followed by this year's expansion on the West Coast. The two older facilities are single tenant buildings for NTT America.

Gomi says NTT America's data center client base is slightly different on each coast. "On the West Coast, we see growth in Web 2.0 companies," he said. "Given the nature of NTT, there are also many Asian-based customers. Because of latency issues, the West Coast is a key location for Asian customers. On the East Coast, get quite a bit of business related to government and some Fortune 500 customers."

More Expansion Possible
Gomi said NTT America may soon look beyond its historic focus on nothern Virginia and Silicon Valley and add data centers in other locations. "We are considering it, especially given the high cost of power in the Bay area," he said.

Bloom said the global nature of NTT"s business is also a factor. "Our context is not just the US, " he said. "In the data center, we're moving in the direction of trying to build a consistent set of services around the world. Some of our customers are classic US Internet companies that can have a single location. But many of our customers are global companies, that may need to have data centers in more than one place."