Digital Realty to Give One Lucky Startup Free Data Center Space and Power

Digital Realty Trust has kicked off a contest for startups, offering the winner a free 4 kW cabinet with power and fiber connectivity at one of its data centers as well as access to conference and break rooms in its facilities.

The contest is part of the San Francisco-based developer and data center provider's Digital Accelerator program. Digital Realty has grown along with a number of its tenants that started using its services in the startup phase and grew into successful businesses, and the new accelerator is a way to stimulate this dynamic to continue.

It is also a good way to meet lots of potential customers for the company's retail colocation business, which the predominantly wholesale provider has been expanding since 2012.

Digital Realty provides data center space for companies like SoftLayer, Facebook, CenturyLink, NetApp and SingleHop, among many others. SoftLayer is an example of a firm that started its relationship with the wholesale data center provider early on in its life and has grown to the point where its owners were able to sell to IBM last year, reportedly for about $2 billion.

Digital Realty is now accepting applications for the contest, which will be reviewed by its senior management, and the winner will be announced around the end of September.

Matt Miszewski, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Digital Realty, said, "Everyone at Digital Realty, from our engineers and infrastructure analysts to our senior management team, is looking forward to sharing our resources and knowledge with the next generation of digital innovators."

Applications are due by August 31, 2014. They can be submitted at digitalaccelerator.co

Here's what the winning startup will get: