Roundup: Rackspace, Digital Realty, Quality

Rackspace Hosting (RAX), the world's leading hosting services provider, today announced that it has repaid $100 million on its revolving line of credit backed by Comerica Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Wachovia Bank, Bank of America and The Frost National Bank. The move decreases the amount owed from $200 million to $100 million. The company said its average borrowing costs on the remaining $100 million outstanding debt balance is approximately 3.9%. With the repayment, $144 million is available on the credit facility.

Digital Realty Trust (DLR) said it has achieved "five 9s" of uptime with another year of 99.999% availability across its portfolio of facilities in North America and Europe in 2008. The company said the metrics are based on a comprehensive evaluation of the company's Turn-Key Datacenter facilities in the US and Europe using standard industry methodology. "This is a great validation of how well designed our datacenters are and how skilled our operations team is," said Ted Martin, Vice President, Technical Operations at Digital Realty Trust. "We have exceeded the five-9s benchmark for four straight years going back to our first year in business as a public company, and we have been able to do that while dramatically increasing the number of facilities we own and operate."

Quality Technology Services (QualityTech), one of the nation's largest privately-held providers of data center facilities, said it has completed work on its 60,000 square foot expansion of its data center space in Santa Clara, which will open this spring. The data center is a two-floor facility with 30,000 square feet of space on each floor and multiple Silicon Valley Power substations providing 4.8 megawatts of power. The company said that one-third of the facility's space has already been accounted for by current client growth. QualityTech currently manages and operates more than 2 million square feet of data center space with a market value in excess of over half-a-billion dollars.

Terremark Worldwide (TMRK) chairman Manuel Medina told the company's employees that he is "frustrated" with the recent decline in the company's shares, citing "a disconnect between our stock price and the performance of our company." Terremark shares closed Wednesday at $2.16, and traded as low as $1.87 on Monday. The company's shares started the year at $4, but have declined in recent weeks. Medina said he believed Terremark's shares had been hurt by broader pessimism about the economy and the stock market. "One of the negatives of being a public company is that you are being valued every minute of the day and today we are seeing that there are many companies with strong fundamentals that are being penalized for the overall conditions of the marketplace," he said, asking employees to focus on the company's strong performance rather than daily fluctuations of Terremark's stock price. Medina's letter was included in an SEC filing.