Upgrades Planned for LA's Garland Building

The Garland Building (1200 W. 7th) in Los Angeles, which hosts several data centers, has been plagued by power capacity and reliability problems for several years. Help may be on the way, as the building's management is promising $30 million in infrastructure upgrades for the 740,000 square foot building. The Internet companies at 1200 W. 7th have been pressing for upgrades since the building suffered major outages in 2005 and 2006.

The impetus for the upgrades is a new lease by anchor tenant Bank of America, which will pay $28 million to continue leasing 83,000 square feet on the lower levels. Real estate sources said the Bank of America lease was the key to a plan by master lease holder Charter Holdings to upgrade the building. Jason Warner of CB Richard Ellis told industry journal Globe Street that Charter Holdings will invest $30 million to upgrade the infrastructure by doubling the size of the central plant and "significantly increasing the building's power, back-up power and mechanical equipment."

The Garland Building made headlines in the summer of 2006, when power problems caused an extended outage for MySpace, the massive social network. On July 24 the building lost all power during a rolling grid outage, as an automatic transfer switch and UPS backup system failed. Then on July 28, the Garland building suffered another loss of power, which was attributed to a dead short while the building was on generator power.

That proved too much for several data center tenants. MySpace moved its operations to the new Equinix facility in El Segundo, while hosting provider media temple also moved out. Switch and Data and shared hosting specialist DreamHost continue to operate data centers in the building. DreamHost, which has experienced strong growth, has cited "space and power constraints" as the reason for relocating servers to a second data center in recent months.