Instor to Fit Out Data Center Halls for Digital Realty Customers

Instor, which provides infrastructure solutions for data center floors, has gotten on the list of Digital Realty Trust’s official contractors used to outfit data halls for its customers.

Digital Realty Trust is one of the biggest data center providers in the world and the biggest wholesale data center provider in the world, and the deal is a huge win for Instor. The contractor has been doing work for Digital Realty for about one year, and the wholesaler recently made it official by naming it “alliance partner.”

“It’s a big deal for us,” Jack Vonich, vice president of sales and strategic partnerships at Instor, said. “It could be one of the largest deals that we’ve done as a partnership.”

Instor will provide remote power panels, power distribution units, IT racks, hot- and cold-aisle containment solutions and other infrastructure components. It will both supply the equipment and hire subcontractors to install it, managing the process from start to finish.

The company will compete for projects with general contractors Digital Realty also uses to do this kind of work. Vonich says Instor can get the components cheaper and quicker than the data center contractors do, since it gets them directly from manufacturers instead of going through a multi-stage supply chain general contractors usually go through.

Instor has been serving the lab and data center industry since 1988, but has recently been branching out beyond its traditional end-user focus. “We do this kind of business direct with end users a lot, and we just started doing more of it with colocation facilities and their customers,” Vonich said.

Do date, the company has worked on about 40,000 square feet of data center space for Digital Realty. The projects include a 10,000-square-foot facility in Santa Clara, California, for a software company, 14,000 square feet in Ashburn, Virgnia, for a media corporation and about 15,000 square feet of space total at a Franklin Park, Illinois, facility for a telco, a financial services firm and another software provider.

While Digital Realty is going through a portfolio-optimization process, selling off underperforming or “non-core” properties, its global data center portfolio is going to remain massive. The company continues to lease out big chunks of data center space every quarter, which means a lot of potential business for a partner like Instor.

In the second quarter, for example, Digital Realty leased out about 285,000 square feet of space. It signed leases for about 370,000 square feet of space in the first quarter. Not all, but most of that space is in North America.