CyrusOne Books Large Colocation Deal

Colocation specialist CyrusOne has built a thriving business providing high-density space to companies in the oil and gas industry. The company's success in this niche has driven an expansion that has seen CyrusOne expand beyond its Houston home base to add data centers in Dallas and Austin.

The latest example is today's announcement that CyrusOne has leased 10,000 square feet of colo space in its newest data center to Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS), one of the world’s leading oil exploration service companies, which will use its high-density server installation in the West Houston facility to power its global exploration projects and operations.

Petroleum Geo-Services has a secure private data hall within CyrusOne’s West Houston campus, with adjacent office space reserved for PGS employees. The hall is located within the 94,000 square foot first phase of the West Houston campus, which will eventually house more than 200,000 square feet of mission-critical colocation space.

GPS does 3D seismic imaging to help oil companies identify the most promising oil and gas reservoirs under the ocean floor. Computer modeling allows oil companies to analyze seismic data and produce 3D images that identify the best location and trajectory for drilling wells. These modeling applications require enormous computing power. CyrusOne has demonstrated its ability to host infrastructure with the horsepower to perform these compute-intensive tasks (see Imaging the Earth's Depths at 750 Watts a Square Foot).

Comparing Build vs. Lease vs. Colo
PGS, which is based in Norway and maintains 23 data centers around the globe, conducted a thorough cost analysis that compared the total costs of building and maintaining its own data center, leasing a facility, or colocating with a provider. After modeling the possibilities and weighing their options, PGS determined it was more cost efficient to leverage CyrusOne’s colocation services.

One of the factors in that decision was energy efficiency. PGS projects that by relocating its data center infrastructure to CyrusOne’s facility, PGS will reduce the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUR) ratio for its Houston data center by 27 percent.

"The cost to build a high-density data center is prohibitive in most cases, particularly when a co-location provider can meet or exceed high-density requirements at a lower lifecycle cost," said Dave Ferdman, President and CEO of CyrusOne. "Most companies that build their own data centers run into retrofit or upgrade issues a few years down the road, which drives the cost even higher. Top tier data centers such as our new West Houston location are future-proof, providing optimal power consumption in conjunction with the most advanced, scalable high-density architectures available."