Vantage Signs Another Multi-Megawatt Data Center Lab Tenant

Another tenant has signed a multi-megawatt data center lab deal with Vantage Data Centers on the provider's massive Santa Clara, California, campus.

This is the second lab consolidation deal in Santa Clara Vantage has talked about publicly this year. The trend is driven by high cost of office space in Silicon Valley, and in the case of the new customer, desire to evolve beyond an older data center it was operating itself.

The customer's data center was non-upgradable and was more expensive to operate that leasing space from Vantage. Room for growth on Vantage's campus also played a part in the decision.

Vantage's previous big data center lab deal in Santa Clara was with Symantec. The most recent one is with a Silicon Valley software company whose name the data center provider has not disclosed.

The Symantec deal included both lower-redundancy lab space as well as data center space with redundant power infrastructure. The new customer is employing 2N redundancy across the entire data center lab footprint, using about 10 kW per rack.

Companies have traditionally built IT labs in their office buildings. One of the reasons there is demand for lab space in data centers in Silicon Valley is skyrocketing office-space rent. Lab customers have traditionally shied away from wholesale, as many providers offer uniform space and redundancy they don’t need or use, but Vantage has been vocal in its willingness to tailor to a variety of needs.

Vantage CEO Sureel Choksi recently emphasized the company’s flexibility in terms of what it can deliver. Late last year, COO Chris Yetman discussed Vantage’s desire to help out with Open Compute deployments as well.

The Santa Clara data center market is on the rise. Vantage competitor CoreSite recently announced it was building a massive data center there for a single customer. Chinese internet giant Alibaba said earlier this year it was going to launch a Silicon Valley data center, and more big tech companies from China have been shopping around for data center space in the region as well.

Vantage signed its first data center lab deal at the end of 2014 with an undisclosed customer taking 3 megawatts.

Other deals for Vantage in the past year include one with enterprise Hadoop specialist Cloudera for an undisclosed but “significant amount of data center space,” and an unnamed e-commerce company expanded its footprint on the campus by 1.5 MW.

Enterprise NoSQL provider MarkLogic switched from retail colocation to wholesale space with Vantage in Santa Clara last October.