i/o Data Centers Reports Brisk Leasing

One of the mantras at i/o Data Centers is that "Scale Matters." That's why the Phoenix-based company chose a 538,000 square foot facility to house its Phoenix ONE data center.

It has turned out to be a good thing that the company built big, because the customer deals have been big as well. Less than a year after the first customer installations at Phoenix ONE, the 180,000 square foot first phase has been sold out, i/o Data Centers said this week.

"We are selling inventory as quickly as we can build," Anthony Wanger, president of i/o Data Centers. "We’ve sold through 20 megawatts of power in a year. The issue is acceleration. We’re doing bigger deals, and were closing them faster. Clearly, there is more demand here than we generally understood a couple years ago."

i/o Data Centers began construction on Phoenix ONE's second phase in late 2009, as the first phase began to approach full occupancy. The phase two construction plan includes 180,000 square feet of raised floor, 20 MW of UPS and 36 MW of generator backup. This will bring the facility’s total capacity to 360,000 square feet of raised floor, 40 MW of fully redundant UPS and 72 MW of backup power generation. Phoenix ONE contains more than 57 miles of network cabling and Type I access to more than a dozen telecommunications carriers.

Wanger said i/o Data Centers now has 350 customers, which are about evenly split between colocation services and wholesale data center suites. That customer base has a beneficial network effect when it comes to exchanging traffic. The company recently performed a study of customer cross connects in its facilities, and estimated that existing customers could save more than $25 million in cross connect fees over the next three years.

"We’ve never charged for cross-connects, and almost all of our competitors do, but it hasn’t been until this analysis was completed that we realized the magnitude of the impact on IT departments," said George Slessman, CEO of i/o Data Centers.