CoreSite Kicks Off Massive Silicon Valley Data Center Expansion

Responding to growing demand for compute capacity that is expected to continue to rise through much of the rest of the decade, CoreSite Reality Corp. announced this week that it plans to add 230,000 square feet of space to its data center facilities in Santa Clara, California.

The new Silicon Valley data center is expected to be completed in 2016, Ryan Oro, vice president, general management at CoreSite, said. Demand for data center capacity in the San Francisco Bay Area is being fueled by a massive expansion of the number of web-scale companies being founded and the number of global companies that now need a data center presence in the area.

“Tech companies want to be close to their data center,” says Oro. “They could find data centers will cheaper access to power 100 miles away, but it’s hard to find IT people that want to work there.”

Just this April, the company announced it would build a 140,000 square foot data center on its Santa Clara for a single tenant whose name was not disclosed.

Oro says CoreSite is scheduled to break ground on the new multi-tenant Silicon Valley data center, called SV7, in the third quarter of this year. The company expects to substantially complete Phase I of the building by the second quarter of 2016, bringing total size of the CoreSite Santa Clara data center campus to approximately 600,000 square feet.

CoreSite currently provides customers with access to 40 network, cloud, and IT service providers, including direct connection to Amazon Web Services. Oro says that one of the primary reasons that customers opt to deploy applications in the company’s data center facilities is access to the largest internet peering exchange on the west coast.

Many web applications are especially sensitive to network latency. Rather than deploying applications in rural locations, IT organizations are opting to deploy web applications in data center facilities that are at most one network hop away from an peering exchange.

In addition to the data center facilities itself, CoreSite provides access to CoreSite Open Cloud Exchange, a portal through which IT organizations can provision resources from CoreSite and its partners on demand.

Oro says that CoreSite will use the new facility to expand both its retail and wholesale data center services, both of which he says continue to grow rapidly.

As yet, Oro says that most of the IT personnel managing those data centers are working out of the offices of their own individual companies, but Oro notes that CoreSite does make office space available to customers that need it.

Assuming, of course, there is no technology bubble to actually burst, demand for data center services in the Bay Area should be expected to outstrip available supply for some time to come.