Sabey Data Centers News

Sabey Data Centers Closes $675 Million Financing Led by TD Securities

Seattle, WA – Sabey Data Centers announced today that it has closed a financing transaction led by TD Securities consisting of a $425 million 5-year term loan and a $250 million 5-year revolver.  The transaction was upsized by $50 million amid meaningful oversubscription.

Proceeds of the term loan will be used to refinance existing property-level debt into a corporate facility, while the revolver will be used to fund capital expenditures for data center development and strategic initiatives.  In connection with strong demand trends, the Company plans to expand its data center campus in Northern Virginia, the largest and fastest growing data center market in North America, as well as in Central Washington, which benefits from low power rates and a mild climate ideal for efficient cooling.

Rob Rockwood, President, Sabey Data Centers, said, “From a strategic perspective, this transaction will provide the capital we need to stay ahead of market conditions. The data center development market is extremely active, especially with prospective tenants who are demanding large blocks of inventory as a condition for entering into a lease deal.”

He added, “The leasing paradigm has changed. Up to the recent past, data center users would move onto a campus and then build out incrementally, on an ‘as needed’ basis. This is no longer the case.”

“TD Securities is pleased to have had the opportunity to work with Sabey Data Centers on this financing transaction.  Management has done an excellent job of executing on their investment thesis and we are excited to provide the Company with ample financing capacity to support their next wave of expansion and organic growth.  We look forward to continuing to support the Company’s strategic growth initiatives moving forward,” said Ed Kim, Director at TD Securities.

In operation for 40 years, Sabey Data Centers is one of the largest privately-owned multi-tenant data center operators in the United States.  Sabey’s data centers provide wholesale data center services to many of the world’s top financial, technology, telecommunications and healthcare companies and position customers to combine key market locations with sustainable, low cost power.

Sabey owns and operates state-of-the-art data center campuses in strategic markets across the US, including Seattle Washington; Ashburn, Virginia; Quincy, Washington; and Wenatchee, Washington.  Headquartered in Seattle, Sabey Data Centers is a joint venture between Sabey Corporation and National Real Estate Advisors.

About Sabey Data Centers

With a portfolio of more than three million square feet of mission critical space, Sabey Data Center Properties is one of the largest privately owned multi-tenant data center owner/developer/operators in the United States.  Sabey specializes in scalable, custom-built solutions including data center ready shell space and fully turnkey data centers managed by Sabey’s award-winning critical environment staff. Consistently recognized for its reputation for operational excellence through its world-class data centers and sustained uptime, Sabey is proud to provide data center services to many of the world’s top financial, technology and healthcare companies.  www.sabeydatacenters.com

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Big Bend, area data centers partner for new training program

MOSES LAKE – Big Bend Community College and regional data centers are partnering for a new program to prepare students for data center positions.

Demand for IT professionals in eastern Washington has increased in the past decade, with an influx of major technology companies taking advantage of the area’s affordable electrical power and locating data centers in the area.

That demand has led to a partnership between Big Bend and Quincy-area data centers operated by Intuit, Microsoft, Oath, NTT DATA, Sabey Data Centers and Vantage Data Centers.

“We are working closely with the data centers to customize our credentials to train students with the skills they need,” said Tom Willingham, Big Bend computer science specialist. “Students who successfully complete this one-year program will be equipped with the knowledge needed to gain entry-level employment with one of these amazing companies.”

Students who complete the program can earn the Network Support Specialist Certificate of Accomplishment and the Systems Administration Certificate of Achievement at Big Bend, and may also have the option to earn industry certificates and a variety of relevant two-year degrees.

Big Bend has limited space for students in the program starting this fall. Some of the area data centers are working toward providing targeted financial aid assistance and on-the-job training opportunities.

To learn more about the program, contact Willingham at 509-793-2321 or by email to tomwi@bigbend.edu.

Source: ifiberone.com

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Sabey Cited by the U.S. Department of Energy as Highest Energy Saving Data Center Operator in Government’s “Better Buildings Challenge”

Seattle, WA, June 20, 2017 – Sabey Data Centers announced today that the federal Department of Energy (DOE) has recognized the company as the data center operator that achieved the highest level of energy savings in the Department’s 2017 Better Buildings Progress Report.

The citation by the DOE was presented last month in Washington, D.C. at the agency’s 2017 Better Buildings Summit trade conference. The Better Buildings Challenge enrolls enterprise “partners” across a broad spectrum of industry sectors. In the program, DOE challenges companies to showcase solutions to cut energy intensity in their buildings portfolio-wide by 20% over a 10-year period.

Sabey Data Centers was noted not only for having achieved its goals in 2016, but also for having the highest percentage of savings so far of all data center operators enrolled in the Better Buildings Challenge program. Second and third highest savers were eBay and Digital Realty Trust, respectively – two of the largest data center operators in the world.

Rob Rockwood, President, Sabey Data Centers, said, “To be cited as a company that has a proven approach to significant energy savings is a great honor. It’s also a testament to our operations staff’s everyday commitment to energy efficiency and the eagerness on our customers’ part to embrace these practices.”

The DOE also highlighted Sabey Data Centers’ Intergate.Quincy facility in Washington State as a “Leadership in Action” model for the industry. At the Summit, the DOE stated: “Sabey Data Center Properties has demonstrated that high efficiency design can be applied effectively in co-located data center spaces by achieving 41% savings at the multi-tenant Intergate.Quincy facility.”

About Sabey Data Centers

With a portfolio of more than three million square feet of mission critical space, Sabey Data Center Properties is one of the largest privately-owned multi-tenant data center owner/developer/operators in the United States. Sabey specializes in scalable, custom-built solutions including data center ready shell space and fully turnkey data centers managed by Sabey’s award-winning critical environment staff. Consistently recognized for its reputation for operational excellence through its world-class data centers and sustained uptime, Sabey is proud to provide data center services to many of the world’s top financial, technology and healthcare companies. http://sabey.com/datacenters/

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Greater New York Market Sees New Players, Pockets of Strength

NEW YORK, N.Y. – In recent years, the Greater New York data center market has faced several strong headwinds, including the financial crisis and its chilling effect on spending, fallout from flood-related outages during Superstorm Sunday, and a tough competitive environment for the region’s wholesale providers.

But data center professionals say the New York/New Jersey market has begun to stabilize, as leasing has gradually absorbed vacant space. The region has recently seen some new entrants, and one long-time player is reporting signs of a rebound. There’s also been the emergence of a new sub-market in Rockland County, N.Y.

The New York/New Jersey region has always been a composite data center market, segmented by geography and business models, with carrier hotels in Manhattan, connected colocation centers in Northern New Jersey, and a cluster of wholesale data centers in Central New Jersey Trends in the New York region were discussed in several panels at the recent Greater New York Data Center Summit, a CapRate Events conference held at Convene. They says the economics of power remain a challenge for New Jersey wholesale providers, with many large customers opting for the cheaper electricity and critical mass found in Northern Virginia.

As some look to the future, they see the potential for new technologies to boost the data center business in the region’s population centers.

“What will the Internet of Things or autonomous driving mean for your data center?” asks Peter Feldman, the CEO of DataGryd. “Am I going to need a much bigger data center just to control those cars? It comes back to latency, and how this is going to work.”

Cities are expected to be the focus of investment activity around autonomous cars, which could generate as much as $7 trillion of economic activity by some estimates, and generate extraordinary data traffic in major cities.

The View From Manhattan

It’s been five years since Superstorm Sandy brought catastrophic flooding to Lower Manhattan, affecting several data center buildings that lost power when their ground level fuel storage pumps failed.Sandy established new parameters for risk, prompting some companies to move uptown and others to relocate their data centers out of the region. In the hurricane’s aftermath, the Manhattan market saw several important developments: 

  • Sabey Data Centers acquired and renovated the former Verizon building at 375 Pearl Street. In addition to updating the building for modern data center space, Sabey has also retrofitted 15 floors of the building for use as office space.
  • DataGryd took over a large chunk of space at 60 Hudson Street, and made major infrastructure upgrades at the iconic carrier hotel.
  • Google acquired the city’s other marquee carrier hotel at 111 8th Avenue, but is using it for office space, and reportedly doing no new leasing to data center tenants.

That’s a lot of activity for a market that had been stable for many years. Despite Sandy and the turbulence in the financial sector, having data center space in Manhattan is essential for many blue-chip companies and service providers. Manhattan is also seeing demand from international companies.

“Asian companies are looking for footprint in the United States,” said Feldman. “The more successful Asian players have their base of big customers, and they’ll want to get to a big city like New York or Chicago or Silicon Valley.”

“The existing centers in Manhattan are continuing to see growth and are working to get more out of their footprint,” said Matthew Monaco, Senior Director at Equinix, the industry’s largest colocation provider. “You’re also seeing the emergence of interconnection density in Secaucus and several other sites in NJ.”

Monaco said many companies are pursuing a strategy where they host a small number of cabinets in New York, but place a larger footprint in New Jersey.

DataGryd’s Feldman concurred. “The hub and spoke distribution method still holds true,” he said. “We’re seeing some edge customers come to us because they need a hub to bring the traffic back.”

The importance of the city’s carrier hotels was reinforced by Digital Realty, the world’s largest data center landlord. Big-city “Internet gateways” have always been a focus for Digital Realty, and that’s still the case today, even as its footprint spreads well into the suburbs.

“We still have fairly dominant positions with our Internet gateways into the city, which is obviously focused on performance-sensitive colocation and interconnection points,” said Bill Stein, the CEO of Digital Realty. “We continue to see strong demand, be it at 111 8th, 60 Hudson or 32 Avenue of Americas.”

Evolving Market in New Jersey

For all their connectivity, the Manhattan carrier hotels have relatively limited footprints. Companies seeking larger chunks of data center space have always looked across the Hudson and housed servers in New Jersey.

Colocation hubs sprung up in Weehawken, Secaucus and Newark to provide connectivity and hosting for Wall Street firms. In 2007, developers began building wholesale data centers in central New Jersey, and soon began to win customers who might otherwise build their own facilities. There’s also a modular data center business operated in Edison by IO, which plays in both the retail and wholesale markets.

The initial strong momentum for wholesale has slowed since 2013, when the New Jersey market faced an oversupply of space.
“New Jersey is transitioning from a wholesale market to a retail colo market,” said Jeffrey West, Director of Data Center Research at CBRE. “It’s been a slow couple of years. But like California, New York and New Jersey will always be a critical market.”

“The New York/New Jersey area hasn’t kept up with markets like Northern Virginia,” said Rick Drescher, Managing Director of the Critical Facilities Group at Savills Studley. “At the local and state government level, we don’t have nearly the visibility we should.”

A key challenge is the price of electricity, which runs 15 to 16 cents per kilowatt hour in New York, and about 9 to 10 cents per kWh in New Jersey. That makes for a tough comparison with “Data Center Alley” in Ashburn, where power is 6 to 7 cents per kWh.

“That price difference is hard to overcome,” said Drescher. “If you’re building 25 or 30 megawatts, it adds up.”

The Road Ahead

The wholesale market in central New Jersey is in a transition with the arrival of two new players. In 2016 QTS Data Centers acquired the huge DuPont Fabros Technology NJ1 data center in Piscataway. DuPont Fabros built the facility seeking large-footprint colo deals, but several industry veterans say QTS’ broader mix of products – it sells wholesale space, retail colocation and managed services – is a better fit for the current New Jersey market.

There’s another new player just up the road in Somerset, where CyrusOne has acquired a wholesale data center built by Sentinel Data Centers. In recent years, CyrusOne has been one of the fastest-growing players in the wholesale market.


Panelists at the CapRate event see progress ahead for the New Jersey market.

“There will continue to be good absorption,” said Monaco. “It’s still a buyer-friendly market. The supply will be absorbed over time.”

“I think pricing is going to be more aggressive,” said Scott Palsgrove, VP of Sales and General Manager for New Jersey at Cologix, which has data centers in Parsippany and Ceda Knolls. “We’re willing to get customers in the door, because we believe they’ll grow with us. There seems to be a lot of capacity in this market, and it’s not moving as fast as it should.”
Among the major competitors in the market, CoreSite is notable for its upbeat assessment of market conditions.

“We feel good about the funnel in the New York/New Jersey market,” said Paul Szurek, the CEO of CoreSite, in a recent conference call. Szurek said CoreSite has signed 20 new and expansion leases in the region in the first quarter of 2017, more than 60 percent above the trailing 12-month average.

“Leasing at NY-2 (in Secaucus, NJ) was quite robust accounting for two-thirds of leases executed, and the majority of new logo signed in this market,” Szurek said. “We see a steady stream of leasing activity among smaller customer deployments, which is weighted toward the enterprise vertical including financial services and healthcare.”

Tested by Time, Trials

There’s also been activity in Rockland County, where a new sub-market has emerged. The current nexus of activity is Orangeburg, where Sentinel Data Centers and Russo Development partnered to build a new data center for Bloomberg, and 1547 Realty opened a data center with Green House Data as the anchor tenant. Meanwhile, JP Morgan Chase has expressed interest in acquiring land at the former Rockland Psychiatric Center for use as a data center.

The activity in Orangeburg is focused on financial firms, a promising development for the region’s data center scene, which is stabilizing as Wall Street has selectively resumed interest in local IT operations.

“I think we’ve gotten rational and operators have taken a slower approach,” said Matt Gleason, GM for the Northeast for CoreSite. “This market will go as the financial services guys go. It’s that kind of market.”

Feldman notes that the data centers in New York have unusual experience with resiliency and recovery, noting that 60 Hudson Street and other NY facilities “have been tested by terrorists and acts of God.”

Source:

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Taller Data Centers Come to Ashburn, Santa Clara

coresite-sv7-740

After decades of building out, the data center industry is building up. Leading developers are now building multi-story data centers, boosting their capacity to house IT gear by adding vertical space. The trend is most pronounced in the two hottest data center markets, Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley, where it’s becoming more difficult to find development sites for new construction projects.

While the shift to multi-story buildings may not seem like a hot real estate trend, it’s a new direction for data center construction, which for many years focused on sturdy, single-story cement fortresses.

An example is Santa Clara, the data center capital of Silicon Valley, where CoreSite and Vantage Data Centers have shifted to four-story designs.

“Land is highly constrained here,” said Sureel Choksi, the president and CEO of Vantage Data Centers. “Because there’s not much land here, data centers are being built taller to maximize capacity. I think that we’ll continue to see that across the industry.”

The trend is coming to Ashburn, the focal point of data center development in Northern Virginia. Ashburn is home to about 5 million square feet of data center space, consisting almost entirely of one or two-story facilities.

“A lot of new buildings are coming in as two-story projects,” said Buddy Rizer, the Executive Director for Economic Development in Loudoun County. “Several users are interested in going higher than that. We want people to develop more, so we will probably allow people to build four-story data centers in Loudoun.”

Digital Realty, CoreSite and RagingWire Data Centers are among those that have recently built multi-story data centers in Loudoun County. Equinix, CyrusOne and Sabey Data Centers are planning two-story facilities.

“I think people are finding two-story infrastructure more acceptable,” said Douglas Adams, the CEO of RagingWire. “I think that’s where things are going.”

From Carrier Hotel to Suburban Sprawl

From the earliest days of the Internet boom, servers and telecom equipment have been housed on the upper floors of skyscrapers in of major cities.

These carrier hotels, like 60 Hudson Street in New York, provide services to the nexus of business customers in the central business district of these cities. But both power and real estate are expensive, and in limited supply.

That’s why data center construction soon focused on the suburbs, and server farms grew horizontally, with single stories across larger footprints. It became common for single story facilities to spread out to make room for more capacity, spanning 300,000 to 500,000 square feet of space.

As Internet growth accelerated in 2015, Google shifted to a multi-story model, building four-story data centers in Iowa and Oklahoma. The taller facilities allow Google to pack more servers into the same real estate footprint, providing more bang for its buck on each of its huge cloud campuses.

“It’s a natural evolution of our campus strategy,” Joe Kava, the Vice President of Data Centers at Google, told DCF in a 2016 interview. “If you’re looking to preserve the amount of expansion on a campus, you look to densify and get the most out of every square foot, and that means multi-story.”

CoreSite: Focus on Land Use

While the design shift at Google drew attention to the trend, the real pioneer in vertical data centers has been CoreSite, one of the real estate investment trusts (REITs) focused on the data center sector. The company got its start as largest colocation provider at One Wilshire, the iconic 30-story telecom hub in downtown Los Angeles. It went on to build a national footprint of 20 data centers in eight major markets.

Brian Warren, CoreSite’s Senior Vice President of Engineeering and Product, said the company has a history of optimizing the yield of data center space from available real estate.

“The industry’s getting smarter about the use of land,” said Brian Warren, CoreSite’s Senior Vice President of Engineering and Product. “You have fewer locations and you have to drive efficiency in the use of land. It’s not anything new for us.”

An example: At a time when its rivals in Ashburn were building one-story facilities, CoreSite took a different approach just down the road at its campus in Reston. After retrofitting an existing structure for its first data center, CoreSite rolled out a five-story design for VA2, a greenfield build on adjacent land. The top floor houses mechanical and electrical infrastructure, with the remaining four floors dedicated to data halls for tenants.

coresite-reston

Last year CoreSite completed SV7, a four-story facility that is the tallest data center in Santa Clara. The company built several two- and three-story data centers before going even higher with SV7.

CoreSite’s strategy is to develop multi-tenant ecosystems in major markets, creating a campus environment with multiple facilities operating as one. Warren said that often involves making the most of “infill locations” – parcels of land in close proximity to existing sites. In major markets with limited development sites, that may mean working with smaller pieces of land and building vertically.

“It’s a tradeoff,” said Warren. “You have to consider the efficiencies of land relative to the additional considerations of a multi-story data center. From a structural perspective, it’s a little simpler to do one story. With multi-story, you’re pre-planning for electrical and mechanical infrastructure across multiple floors. We obviously feel the efficiencies gained (from multi-story) outweigh the additional considerations.”

One of those efficiencies is the time saved from building several vertical buildings on a single campus, as opposed to constructing lower buildings and having to procure additional land – which also means additional permitting and approvals.

“It compresses our total timeline compared to developing multiple buildings,” said Warren.

CoreSite will further refine its multi-story strategy on its newest campus in Northern Virginia. In August 2016 it bought the Sunrise Technology Park, an office development just a quarter mile from the company’s existing campus The acquisition will provide CoreSite with space to expand its Reston data center operations.

CoreSite plans to retrofit two existing buildings on the property, and then construct two new buildings to serve as connectors so staff and customers can move between data centers through internal corridors. One of the new buildings will be a four-story “infrastructure tower” that will house mechanical and electrical equipment to serve the data halls in the other buildings.

Source: datacenterfrontier.com

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The World’s 6 Weirdest Data Centers – Intergate.Manhattan

A data center with a view
The world’s tallest data center, all 32 stories of it, isn’t the prettiest tower on New York City’s skyline. So its owner, Sabey Data Center Properties, is giving the former Verizon Building a face-lift, including new glass walls to make it more attractive.

Featured in Fortune magazine | The World’s 6 Weirdest Data Centers

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Sabey Data Centers adds PacketFabric’s SDN platform

Sabey Data Centers as began offering PacketFabric’s software-defined networking (SDN) platform at its data centre locations in New York, Seattle, Virginia and Washington.

The fully automated network platform allows direct provisioning of terabit-scale connectivity. Sabey will offer it at their Manhattan, Seattle, Ashburn and Quincy sites.

PacketFabric’s SDN-powered network offers coast-to-coast connectivity between 118 carrier neutral colocation facilities in 11 US markets. Sabey’s customers will now be able to provision connectivity between any locations on that network.

“The digitization of data has driven new network requirements for businesses, especially those with vast data demands such as healthcare providers and enterprises,” said Daniel Meltzer, VP of sales and leasing at Sabey Data Centers.

“Bringing the PacketFabric platform into our facilities provides Sabey customers with industry-leading infrastructure as well as the ability to instantly provision terabits of capacity to any other network or facility connected by the fabric. This enables fast, secure and seamless data transfer as well as reliable, cost-effective connectivity between multiple regions and data centres across the U.S.”

PacketFabric, which is owned by NantWorks, delivers hundreds of terabits per second of on-demand data across its private backbone.

It also allows customers to design and deploy any network configuration by using its API and web-based portal. This, it claims, offers “unmatched visibility and control” over network traffic and services.

“With PacketFabric, Sabey customers can access scalable, next-generation cloud networking services and more easily provision and maintain network infrastructure,” adds William Charnock, CEO of PacketFabric.

“The cloud-based logic underpinning the PacketFabric platform also enables users to mitigate the headaches commonly associated with traditional telecommunications solutions, including expensive stranded capacity and long-term, inflexible contracts, and provision scalable network connectivity on a month-to-month or usage-basis.”

http://www.capacitymedia.com/Article/3671655/News/Sabey-Data-Centers-adds-PacketFabrics-SDN-platform.html

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PacketFabric’s Cloud Networking Platform Now Available in All Sabey Data Center Locations

Sabey Customers Gain Access to Next-Generation Cloud Networking Services and Secure, Terabit-Scale Connectivity

SEATTLE, March 21, 2017 – Sabey Data Centers, one of the largest privately-owned data center owners, operators and developers in the United States, today announces the availability of PacketFabric’s Software-defined Networking (SDN) based network platform at all of its data center locations. A NantWorks company, PacketFabric is a provider of next-generation Ethernet-based cloud networking services. PacketFabric’s fully automated network platform enables instantaneous, direct and secure provisioning of terabit-scale connectivity between any locations on the PacketFabric network, and is now available in the following Sabey Data Centers facilities:
 New York: Intergate.Manhattan
 Seattle: Intergate.Seattle
 Virginia: Intergate.Ashburn
 Washington: Intergate.Quincy

“The digitization of data has driven new network requirements for businesses, especially those with vast data demands such as healthcare providers and enterprises,” says Daniel Meltzer, Vice President of Sales and Leasing at Sabey Data Centers. “Bringing the PacketFabric platform into our facilities provides Sabey customers with industry-leading infrastructure as well as the ability to instantly provision terabits of capacity to any other network or facility connected by the fabric. This enables fast, secure and seamless data transfer as well as reliable, cost-effective connectivity between multiple regions and data centers across the U.S.”

PacketFabric’s any-to-any SDN-powered network facilitates coast-to-coast connectivity between 118 premier carrier-neutral colocation facilities across 11 U.S. markets. The platform delivers hundreds of terabits per second of on-demand connectivity across its purpose-built private backbone network. This innovative architecture enables customers to easily procure and maintain network services in real-time, while reaching hundreds of destinations without the need to deploy and manage costly infrastructure, or rely on the public internet. PacketFabric customers can also dynamically design and quickly deploy any network configuration leveraging an advanced Application Program Interface (API) and web-based portal for unmatched visibility and control over their network traffic and services. Real-time analytics and interactive troubleshooting capabilities allow PacketFabric to offer the robustness of a packet-switched network, while ensuring consistent and reliable performance.

“With PacketFabric, Sabey customers can access scalable, next-generation cloud networking services and more easily provision and maintain network infrastructure,” adds William Charnock, CEO of PacketFabric. “The cloud-based logic underpinning the PacketFabric platform also enables users to mitigate the headaches commonly associated with traditional telecommunications solutions, including expensive stranded capacity and long-term, inflexible contracts, and provision scalable network connectivity on a month-to-month or usage-basis.”

About Sabey Data Centers
With a portfolio of more than three million square feet of mission critical space, Sabey Data Center Properties is one of the most experienced and largest privately owned multi-tenant data center owner/developer/operators in the United States. Sabey specializes in scalable, custom-built solutions including data center ready shell space and fully turnkey data centers managed by Sabey’s award-winning critical environment staff. Consistently recognized for its reputation for operational excellence through its world-class data centers and sustained uptime, Sabey is proud to provide data center services to many of the world’s top financial, technology and healthcare companies. www.sabey.com

About PacketFabric
PacketFabric redefines how companies procure, consume, and manage their network connectivity services. Leveraging an innovative, entirely automated SDN-based network architecture and the latest in optical and packet switching technology, PacketFabric enables dynamic, real-time connectivity services between major carrier-neutral colocation facilities at terabit-scale. PacketFabric facilitates coast-to-coast connectivity between 118 premier colocation facilities across 11 U.S. markets, and enables simple, cost-effective, and scalable network deployment via its advanced Application Program Interface (API) and web-based portal. For more information, visit www.packetfabric.com or connect with PacketFabric on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

About NantWorks
NantWorks, LLC, founded by renowned physician scientist and inventor of the first human nanoparticle chemotherapeutic agent Abraxane®, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, is the umbrella organization for the following entities: NantHealth, NantMobileHealth, NantOmics, NantBio, NantCell, NantPharma, NantCapital and NantCloud. Fact-based and solution-driven, each of NantWorks’ division entities operates at the nexus of innovation and infrastructure. The core mission of NantWorks is convergence and a systems approach to human biology: to develop and deliver a diverse range of technologies that accelerates innovation, broaden the scope of scientific discovery, enhance ground-breaking research, and improve healthcare treatment for those in need. NantWorks is building an integrated fact-based, genomically and proteomically -informed, personalized approach to the delivery of care and the development of next generation diagnostics and therapeutics for life threatening diseases such as Cancer, Infectious Diseases and Alzheimer’s. For more information please www.nantworks.com and follow Dr. Soon-Shiong on [email protected] @DrPatSoonShiong.

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Sabey Launches First Building in Booming N. Virginia Data Center Market

by Yevgeniy Sverdlik

Sabey Data Center Properties, the Seattle-based wholesale data center developer, has completed and tested its first Northern Virginia data center. The facility is the first of three the company is planning to build at its Intergate.Ashburn campus, which at total build-out is expected to be 900,000 square feet large, with capacity to support about 70MW of power.

While Sabey has had East Coast presence since 2011, when it acquired the Verizon tower in Manhattan, this week’s announcement marks its first foray into Northern Virginia, North America’s biggest and most active data center market. Data center space is in high demand in Ashburn, where much of the region’s data center capacity is located, and Sabey has already signed a tenant for a 1.8MW, 12,000-square foot quadrant in the newly finished building, whose total capacity is 7.2MW.

The developer did not disclose the tenant’s name. Robert Rockwood, Sabey’s head for the eastern region, told us in an interview last year, as the first building was still under construction, that numerous existing customers who are using space in Sabey data centers in Washington State and New York, were interested in Northern Virginia data center capacity.

Customers leased 84.4MW total in 2016 from data center providers in Northern Virginia, according to a recent market report by the commercial real estate company CBRE Group. That’s not counting several pre-lease deals that were signed 2016 but were not due to be delivered this year. Those deals would bring the region’s 2016 total to about 140MW.

The Dallas-Fort Worth market was second in total absorption last year, with 37.6MW of data center capacity leased, and Chicago was third, with 36.2MW, according to the report.

Together, data center providers in major US markets signed leases for 195MW of capacity total. Those markets are Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, New York-New Jersey, Northern Virginia, Phoenix, and Silicon Valley. That number represents a slight decline from absorption the previous year, when companies leased out 200MW of capacity in those markets.

Most of the data center leasing momentum across the country was fueled by hyper-scale cloud service providers, and that was especially true in the Northern Virginia data center market. In a statement, Jamie Jelinek, CBRE’s senior associate for Data Center Solutions, said:

“With the Ashburn area’s prominence as one of the most densely connected fiber-rich areas in the U.S., cloud service providers have dominated a significant portion of leasing in the region. In most cases, cloud provider requirements are being deployed in third-party facilities. Some of this is speed-to-market-driven to meet immediate customer needs. But it is also part of a larger ‘active-active’ cloud infrastructure strategy where redundancy needs are shifted away from each individual data center and spread out to the network and application level.”

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Sabey – Oasis™ IEC provides energy-efficient rejection of data center heat

In Quincy Washington, Sabey Data Center Properties is one of six major data centers utilizing low-cost, reliable hydro electric power sustained from the nearby Columbia River.

Evaporative cooling is one of nature’s fundamental methods of cooling. It is the same cooling principle that our own body uses when moisture (sweat) evaporates and cools the skin. The Munters Oasis™ Indirect Evaporative Cooling systems take advantage of evaporation to reject heat without ever adding any moisture to the data center.

By using hot aisle containment, the hot air leaving the servers is kept separate from the cool air being supplied to the servers, which allows the use of warmer supply air temperatures. This also results in hotter return air temperatures, which is an excellent situation for implementing an indirect evaporative cooling solution. With Munters Oasis™ Indirect Evaporative Coolers (IEC), the air from the data center is cooled using Munters patented Oasis™ polymer heat exchanger, often without the need for supplemental mechanical cooling or water.

On cold and cool days the Oasis™ polymer heat exchanger operates dry and simply acts as an air-to-air heat exchanger. Outside air (commonly referred to as scavenger air) indirectly cools the data center air through normal heat exchange, without the use of any water.

Once the ambient temperature rises to a certain point, the Oasis™ heat exchanger will not be able to provide enough cooling while operating in this dry mode. When this happens, water is pumped from sumps that are internal to the air handlers to spray nozzles that wet the outside surface of the Oasis™ heat exchanger tubes, coating them with a thin layer of water. During the few hours a year when the outside temperatures are too high and moist for the evaporative cooling alone, a small mechanical cooling system (“trim DX”) supplements the evaporative cooling process, so that the air supplied to the data center is maintained at the right temperature. This condition, where refrigeration is required to supplement the IEC, only occurs during ambient conditions with simultaneous high heat and humidity.

To further improve the system efficiency in this supplemental cooling mode, the condenser coil of the trim DX is located in the scavenger exhaust air stream, after the heat exchanger and mist eliminator. The scavenger exhaust air, because of the evaporative cooling effect, is generally cooler than the ambient temperature whenever refrigeration is required to operate. Because the Oasis™ IEC system is a recirculating system, the data center is cooled without the introduction of outdoor air pollutants that might adversely impact the servers. Since Quincy WA is an agricultural area, air laden with dust, or smoke from burning fields would otherwise impact the data hall if a direct air-side economizer was implemented.

Munters Oasis™ IEC keeps the air inside the data center completely separated from the air outside. The entry of contamination (dust, smoke, etc.) from agricultural activities is minimized. Further, this highly efficient cooling system saves in annual operating costs resulting from lower power and water consumption compared to conventional water-cooled chiller systems.

An annual PUE below 1.2

During integrated systems testing at full load in 2012, a peak PUE of 1.25 was recorded – which was a considerable achievement in such hot conditions. The actual running over longer periods has shown the PUE to be below 1.2. This low PUE makes Intergate.Quincy Sabey facility one of the most effective data centers in the nation.

Federal EPA ENERGY STAR® certification

In 2015, Intergate.Quincy facility received federal EPA ENERGY STAR® certification for superior energy efficiency with the highest possible green score of 100 points. The facility’s Energy Star efficiency performance rating of 100 is the highest level of power consumption efficiency and represents twice the national average for data centers. Intergate. Quincy’s energy intensity, or the amount of energy the data center consumes, is 33% below the national average, according to the EPA’s Statement of Energy Performance for the facility.

“Munters Oasis™ Indirect Evaporative Cooling systems have exceeded our expectations. We’ve been very satisfied with both the air handlers and Munters as a company,” said John Sasser VP Operations for Sabey Data Center Properties.

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