i/o Data Centers Plans Huge NJ Expansion

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A look at the i/o Anywhere modular data center, which will be used in a new facility in New Jersey.

i/o Data Centers is planning to build a huge data center in New Jersey to serve as the East Coast hub for its growing colocation business. The company is in the late stages of site selection for a modular data center that will support at least 550,000 square feet of space.

"We're expanding to the East Coast," said George Slessman, the CEO of i/o Data Centers. "We really think it's critical for our customers to have both East coast and West coast options. We think it's a natural progression."

i/o Data Centers currently operates two data centers in the Phoenix market – a 125,000 square foot site in Scottsdale and i/o Phoenix, which at 538,000 square feet is among the world’s largest data centers. Last month the company closed a $130 million senior credit facility to finance growth, including the New Jersey data center and additional deployments in Phase II of its Phoenix site.

Weighing Two Locations
Slessman said the company has narrowed its site search to two locations in New Jersey, including one "greenfield" new construction site and one site that would involve a retrofit of an existing facility. Either site would be developed using the company's i/o Anywhere modular data center as the deployment model.

"It's going to be larger than i/o Phoenix but less than a million square feet," Slessman said of the New Jersey facility, which will support customer demand for space in the greater New York metro area. "We have multiple customers committed to coming with us to this site. We have customer deliveries for the second quarter of 2011 in the New York/New Jersey market."

More Competition in NJ Market
The announcement by i/o Data Centers brings another major player to the New Jersey market, which has already seen several new providers open facilities this year. Earlier this week DuPont Fabros Technology opened a huge data center in Piscataway, while Sentinel Data Centers is building a large facility in Somerset. Further north, NYSE Euronext has just opened a huge colocation center in Mahwah.

The site selection and construction schedule described by Slessman is enabled by i/o Anywhere, a family of modular data center components that can create and deploy a fully-configured enterprise data center within 120 days. It's among a number of evolving modular designs that seek to go beyond the “server box” to create a fully-integrated data center.

The company says i/o Anywhere will include primary and backup power generation, power conditioning, cooling and network connectivity. Significantly, it also offers the “i/o OS” – a fully-integrated data center monitoring, alarming, remote control and management operating system. i/o Data Centers describes it as an enterprise-grade data center solution that will include a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement.

Slessman says i/o Anywhere will be the deployment "form factor" for the second phase of i/o Phoenix and the company's future facilities, including the New Jersey site. "It's supporting our customers where they need capacity," he said.