Vantage Launches With Santa Clara Project

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A drawing of the plans for one of the facilities at the new Vantage Data Centers campus in Santa Clara, Calif.

There's a new player in the data center business, and it's headed by a familiar name and building a campus in Silicon Valley.

Vantage Data Centers launched today and announced funding from Silver Lake Partners, a leading technology investment firm. Vantage is led by CEO Jim Trout, who has lengthy experience in the wholesale data center space, first as president of CRG West (now CoreSite) and then as Senior VP of Portfolio and Technical operations at Digital Realty Trust.

Vantage has acquired a fully operational data center in Santa Clara, Calif. from Intel and will develop the 18-acre property into a larger data center campus. The property currently features dual 50 megawatt electrical substations.

Building Out A Data Center Campus
There are three buildings on the campus on Walsh Avenue, one of which is fully leased to a data center customer. Vantage has begun work on expanding a second existing structure into a 60,000 square foot data center, which is scheduled to come online in the fourth quarter of this year. The third building on the campus will be retrofitted for data center use, with delivery scheduled for the second quarter of 2011.

"Redevelopment within this large existing campus environment allows our company to collaborate with customers on their long term data center growth plans, providing ample room to expand within the campus and enabling distinctive customer support operations," said Trout. "Vantage will also deliver the lowest energy rates in the region, which combined with our scale and flexibility, will translate into significant potential cost savings for our customers."

As a wholesale data center company, Vantage will build finished "plug-n-play" data center space, which can be leased by clients. Although tenants will pay a premium over typical leases for office space, they are spared the huge capital outlay required to build their own data center.

The wholesale model has proven popular with companies seeking to conserve capital during the credit crunch. Other players in the wholesale space include Digital Realty Trust (DLR), Coresite and DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT), who are all currently building new data center space in Santa Clara.

Focusing on Economies of Scale
Vantage's approach will focus on building data center campuses that offer economies of scale in purchasing power (typically 30 to 40 megawatts per site) and staffing. The company anticipates LEED Platinum certification on two of its buildings, and believes its energy-efficient design will result in some of the lowest Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratings in the Santa Clara market.

Silver Lake Partners is a private equity firm that manages more than $14 billion in investments. The company has experience in the data center sector, having led a consortium of firms in acquiring SunGard Data Systems.