Former Parking Deck Now Equinix's Newest Seattle Facility

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Colocation cages line a long hallway in the new Equinix SE3 data center in Seattle (Photo: Equinix)

A former parking garage in Seattle next to the Westin Building is now the newest Equinix data center. Equinix has opened its second International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in downtown Seattle, adding 51,000 square feet of data center space and capacity for more than 1,000 cabinets, supporting 4.1 megawatts of IT capacity. The new facility demonstrates Seattle’s growth as a data center market, and as an important gateway to the Asia-Pacific market.

The new SE3 data center is adjacent to Equinix’s SE2 data center located in the Westin Building, making for a natural expansion space for customers with existing deployments in that location. The Westin Building is a legacy data center where many networks connect, and SE3 benefits from being just a cross connect away from Seattle's largest carrier hotel.

The Equinix data center was jointly developed by Digital Realty Trust and Clise Properties, who transformed the six-story parking garage into a new facility that includes four floors of data center space.  Digital Realty and Clise are 50-50 partners in both the Westin Building and the new project for Equinix.

Burgeoning Pacific Northwest

The growth in the Seattle metro area is coming from a high concentration of network and cloud service providers, and content and digital media companies. Companies such as Microsoft, T-mobile and Amazon call it home, as well as up-and-coming companies like BlueBox. “We’ve had increasing demand in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in Seattle. There’s ecosystems thriving and growing – that’s why we continue to invest in that market,” said Equinix’s Director of Americas Marketing Jim Farmer, in a company blog post.

“The Seattle market is an important communications hub for the Pacific Northwest and a distribution point for IP traffic to Asia Pacific,” said Charles Meyers, president of the Americas for Equinix. “With SE3, we can offer the many cloud, network and digital content companies in Seattle the ability to directly connect with their customers and partners in order to improve application performance and generate new revenue opportunities.”

SE3 offers direct connectivity to the Seattle Internet Exchange (SIX) and features 24-hour operations and security as well as a slew of amenities. This is data center number 97 for Equinix, its global scale further making Platform Equinix an attractive proposition for customers looking for flexibility as to where they expand with their provider.

“Equinix provides some of the best facilities and operational support out there, which is critical in meeting our customers’ expectations,” said Jesse Proudman, CEO of leading cloud and hosting services company Blue Box. “With our newly deployed infrastructure in SE3, we have no doubt that the network proximity and growth opportunities that Equinix’s ecosystem offers will further solidify our competitive edge.”