A screenshot from the virtual tour of the newly-opened Phoenix NAP facility, available from the company's website.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — After a full year of construction, data center operator and colocation firm Phoenix NAP (www.phoenixnap.com) opened its doors for operation last week.
The one year project racked up 80,000 man-hours of labor on the electrical work alone, and today, the data center employs 20 workers.
Formerly the headquarters for life sciences company EaglePicher, the 160,000 square-foot facility provides high density colocation space to businesses and enterprises. At opening, 15 percent of its 45,000 square foot first phase is already occupied by customers, says the company.
“We invested in a critical infrastructure so the first floor already has the right flooring,” says Ian McClarty, president of Phoenix NAP. “It’s basically set up so as we grow — we have shorter lead time items, anywhere from 2 to 4 week items. We’re ready to service about 25 percent so far, so as customer demands comes in we can service the rest of it.”
The data center offers 90,000 square feet of available colocation space that can deliver 200 watts of power per square foot or more to racks. It incorporates features designed to optimize uptime, including a 2N capable power system and a bi-directional closed water loop.
Both the power and cooling systems are designed with multiple redundancies and concurrent maintainability, enabling workers to perform maintenance on any part of the systems without having to take the entire distribution chain offline.
Ian McClarty, president of PhoenixNAP, says many of the facility’s initial customers are enterprises and businesses from the Phoenix area. However, the data center is also seeing prospective customers in the form of Southern Califonia-based businesses.
“It’s all over the place. We were targeting small businesses initially, but we have a good mix of small enterprise, enterprise, small businesses,” says McClarty. “There really doesn’t seem too much rhyme or reason to it. It’s definitely business-centric, it’s not government yet.”
Phoenix NAP is a carrier neutral facility supported by connectivity via Cox Business, tw telecom, Internap, AboveNet, Level 3 and AGL Networks.
The SAS 70 Type I certified facility will seek its Type II certification after six months of operation. It is also a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard validated services provider.
The facility is developed by Global Datacenter Trust, which favored the Phoenix market because of its ideal location, far from most natural disaster scenarios.
“Everybody’s very active right now. I think overall, the colocation industry is doing really well right now,” says McClarty. “There are definitely a lot of companies looking at Phoenix colocation right now. Whether they’re moving from So-Cal, or they’re looking at their own facilities in the valley, or they’re going through virtualization efforts. So we’re seeing a lot of those types of projects coming through the pipeline.”
A virtual tour of the newly-opened facility is available on the company’s website.
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