Zayo's zColo Enters Atlanta Market With AtlantaNAP Acquisition

zColo, the colocation division of Zayo Group, has acquired service provider Colo Facilities Atlanta and its AtlantaNAP data center, which adds 42,000 square feet of usable data center space inside a 72,000 square foot facility to Zayo's data center fleet, extending it to a total of 28 locations.

This is zColo's first entry into the Atlanta colocation market, although the parent company Zayo has an Atlanta fiber network that spans more than 600 miles. The company has been steadily expanding its national data center presence via acquisition.

The company recently acquired Dallas provider CoreXchange, which added a standalone data center as well as a 12,000 square foot suite at the Dallas Infomart to the fleet. About one year ago the company entered the Austin, Texas, market by purchasing local provider Core NAP.

Zayo’s total data center footprint is now more than 570,000 square feet.

AtlantaNAP, located at 1100 White St. SW, offers 5 megawatts of fully redundant 2N UPS power, serviced from diverse utility feeds. The site will offer Zayo’s full suite of lit bandwidth services and access to Zayo’s metro and long-haul dark fiber backbones.

Zayo’s roots are in bandwidth, a space recently marked by constant consolidation, and the company is one of the players playing an active role in the trend (its recent acquisition of Neo Telecoms network in France is a good example). zColo is an additional line of business that gives Zayo another way to monitize its network assets.

Atlanta colocation market attributes solid

Atlanta is a healthy data center market to expand into. There is a wealth of service providers and Fortune 500 companies, comparatively low power costs, a large IT workforce, a major airport and a generally favorable business climate.

Greg Friedman, vice president of zColo, said, “Atlanta is a high-demand colocation market and a growing hub for healthcare, technology, and large enterprises.”

AtlantaNAP "will now be able to leverage Zayo’s existing fiber footprint to provide a connectivity-driven colocation offering in Atlanta for new and existing customers.”

The biggest player in Atlanta is QTS, which also has been trying to diversify beyond its core market. There are also wholesale providers like T5 and ByteGrid, as well as mixed services players like Peak 10, Colo ATL and DataSite, which offers what it calls hybrid colo, where customers can own or share pieces of the critical infrastructure that they choose.

Two major facilities in Atlanta are 55 Marietta and 56 Marietta, a carrier hotel owned and operated by Telx that houses Atlanta’s Internet Exchange Point (IXP) and is home to several other colo players.