Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of Feb. 16

Equinix-AM3

An exterior view of the Equinix AM3 data center in Amsterdam, one of the many global markets where Equinix expanded in 2012. (Photo: Equinix)

For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week. Enjoy!

Equinix Building Boom Continues. Is Chicago Next? - For Equinix, 2012 was a year of extraordinary expansion in its global infrastructure, as the company spent $607 million on data center construction and another $334 million to acquire companies in key international markets. That colocation company’s growth spanned four continents, adding capacity for for more than 15,750 cabinets, with expansions in northern Virginia, northern New Jersey, Dallas, Miami, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney and Singapore.

Building Smaller: DFT Adopts New Data Center Design - DuPont Fabros Technology will continue to build some of the largest data centers on the planet. But it will do so in smaller chunks. The developer says it is finalizing a new design that will deploy new wholesale data center space in smaller phases of about 4.5 megawatts. DuPont Fabros (DFT) will use the new approach in its ACC7 data center project in Ashburn, Virginia.

QTS Enters Dallas Market, Buys 700,000 SF Facility - QTS (Quality Technology Services) is entering the Dallas data center market, and doing it in a big way. The company has purchased a 700,000 square foot former semiconductor plant, and plans to transform it into a state-of-the-art-data center.

Rackspace Shares Slide as Cloud Revenue Moderates - Shares of Rackspace Hosting fell sharply this week after the company’s earnings raised concerns that the rate of adoption for cloud computing services may be moderating.

Video: LeaseWeb Migrates 3,000 Servers - What’s it like to move 3,000 servers into a new data center? As part of its expansion in the U.S. market, LeaseWeb recently migrated 100 server-filled racks into a new data center hall at the COPT6 facility in Manassas, Virginia. Here's a video overview of the process.