Vantage Completes Santa Clara Data Center

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Jim Trout, the CEO of Vantage Data Centers, with the new data center his company has just completed in Santa Clara.

The newest player in the Silicon Valley data center market is moving quickly. Vantage Data Centers announced today that it has completed construction on its first data center in Santa Clara, Calif. and has already leased wholesale data center space to leading Internet and semiconductor companies based in Silicon Valley.

The new facility is opening less than nine months after Vantage came out of stealth mode with backing from Silver Lake Partners, a leading technology investment firm. It's the first of three data centers Vantage plans to bring online during 2011 on its $300 million Santa Clara campus on Walsh Avenue, where it has 37 megawatts of power capacity.

The 61,192 square foot facility features 40,000 square feet of data center space on a 30-inch raised floor, and is supported by 6 megawatts of provisioned power from Silicon Valley Power. Vantage says it expects its data centers to operate at a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.20 when using fresh air economization to cool servers, and a PUE of  1.29 when using chillers.

Aligning Facilities With Business, Environment

"The Santa Clara project is a showcase for the industry on how data centers can be more aligned with businesses interests and environmental stewardship," said Jim Trout, Vantage Data Center’s CEO. "Vantage's long-term goal is to deliver new levels of efficiency and scalability at every completed campus. Our ability to deliver the lowest energy rates, combined with our scale and flexibility, will translate into significant potential cost savings for our customers."

Trout has lengthy experience in the wholesale data center space, first as president of CRG West (now CoreSite) and TeraSpace Networks and then as Senior VP of Portfolio and Technical operations at Digital Realty Trust.

Last week Vantage filled out its executive team by announcing the appointments of two more industry veterans. Greg Ness joins Vantage as vice president of marketing, while Tony Giampolo is the company's new director of operations. Ness previously held a similar post at cloud computing specialist Infoblox, and has served in various corporate marketing roles at Juniper Networks and Redline Networks. Giampolo recently served as senior manager, global data center operations for NetApp, where he was responsible for global data centers and enterprise monitoring program.

Leasing Reflects Ongoing Demand

Vantage didn't disclose the details of its leasing, but having tenants lined up as it opens its first facility suggests that demand for wholesale data center space remains strong in Silicon Valley. The wholesale model, in which developers lease finished "plug-n-play" data center space, has proven popular with companies seeking to conserve capital during the credit crunch.

Other players in the wholesale space include Digital Realty Trust (DLR), Coresite and DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT), who are all currently building new data center space in Santa Clara.

Vantage sees the power capacity of its campus as a key selling point, as it offers tenants the ability to quickly scale their data center operations as they grow. The Santa Clara site has a dedicated, on-site electrical substation with a dual-fed 50 MW capacity.

That offers headroom for Internet companies experiencing hyper-growth, a key constituency for wholesale providers. But Vantage sees potential in the enterprise market, where many companies will find their existing data centers facing obsolescence in the face of the power and cooling demands of higher-density workloads.

With that in mind, Vantage has included corporate amenities in its data centers, which it describes as "highly functional facilities for conducting business" in a comfortable Class A office-like setting. The company believes this will be a selling point for companies transitioning from in-house data center space to third-party facilities.

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A closer look at the exterior of the new Vantage Data Centers' facility in Santa Clara, Calif.