Cyrus One Expands Dallas Data Center (February 11, 2009) - Colocation provider CyrusOne (www.cyrusone.com) announced on Wednesday it plans to expand its Dallas-area data center, adding 81,000 square feet to its existing 80,000 square foot Lewisville facility to meet the strong demand for data center space in Texas markets.
CyrusOne has also commissioned two new data halls spanning 25,000 square feet in its existing 125,000 square foot Houston campus.
Once it is completed, CyrusOne will occupy about 310,000 square feet of data center space in Texas between five facilities, including two in Houston and three in Dallas.
The expansion comes at a time when many data center operators are scaling back their data center developments in the midst of the recession.
Earlier this week, Terremark Worldwide announced it would postpone the building of a data center in Santa Clara, California.
DuPont Fabros Technology also announced in October the delay of its own Santa Clara $270 million data center after its inability to generate enough capital to finance the project.
"These expansion projects are a significant reflection of the persistent growth we are experiencing in Houston and Dallas," says David Ferdman, president and CEO for CyrusOne. "Despite the economic downturn, our momentum within these markets continues to thrive, as companies consolidate their national data centers in a colocation facility to minimize overall infrastructure costs and avoid significant capital expenditures.
CyrusOne currently supports server installations that offer up to 1,000 watts of power per square foot, compared to its competitors, which typically offer only 120 watts per square foot.
This high density enables customers to implement more sophisticated applications and handle larger volumes of mission-critical information.
The Dallas area is seeing strong demand in data center space, which can be attributed to the city's central location, heavy fiber networks, and having relatively few power problems.
The company offers a slide show presentation on the value of its data centers on its website.
According to the press release, the CyrusOne facilities are "designed for zero downtime," accommodating the latest server technologies in a fully redundant, 2N power and cooling configuration.
The data center operator provides high-availability, high-density data center services, including colocation and implementation services for companies.
CyrusOne is owned by Boston-based private equity investment firm ABRY Partners, which has $21 billion in investments across more than 450 media and communications properties.
In November, Halliburton selected CyrusOne as its data center partner to service its mission-critical IT infrastructure needs.
Halliburton Moves Into CyrusOne (November 17, 2008) - Colocation provider CyrusOne (www.cyrusone.com) announced on Monday that Halliburton (www.halliburton.com) has selected the company as its data center partner to service its mission-critical IT infrastructure needs.
Halliburton, which is one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the oil and gas industry, will relocate and consolidate its hardware systems to occupy several thousand square feet of data center space in CyrusOne's newly constructed facility in Lewisville, Texas.
The data center will later become a key server hosting location for Halliburton's 24-hour operations services.
"Leveraging a high availability colocation provider for flexibility, scalability and adaptability is becoming more common for companies that choose to no longer invest capital dollars building and operating their own data centers," says David Ferdman, CEO of CyrusOne. "Halliburton is a great match for the model, allowing for rapid deployment of mission critical systems during times of growth and overall efficiencies in their data center infrastructure."
The CyrusOne Lewisville data center features CAT-6A cabling, which delivers data transfer at speeds up to 10GB.
To meet Halliburton's extensive cabling needs, technical specialists built a dense yet highly partitioned cable infrastructure that facilitates maximum network performance and rapid service response.
Each foot of cable is labeled and traceable, enabling technicians to immediately detect any problems or defects.
An on-site electrical substation provides full 2N redundancy, two independent power grids, three separate substations, two 42 MVA transformers within on-site substations and a tie breaker to further reinforce 2N reliability and seamless productivity.
Additionally, the facility features unlimited bandwidth capabilities, which can be upgraded to OC-192, while its connectivity is secured through a dual sonet ring powered by major telecommunications carriers.
CyrusOne provides data center services, offering colocation and implementation services for customers in the healthcare, energy and financial industries.
The company was acquired in July 2007 by media and communications private equity firm ABRY Partners.
Ike Ups Disaster Readiness Interest (September 23, 2008) - Hosting companies are now analyzing the impact of Hurricane Ike, which landed in Texas two weekends ago, inflicting an estimated $27 billion in damages in the US alone, and dousing the high-tech hotbed with wind and water.
Following an analysis of its operations during the hurricane, managed hosting, colocation and managed services provider CyrusOne (cyrusone.com) reports its Houston data center sustained no damage, power outages or equipment failures, maintaining 100 percent uptime of its mission-critical systems.
CyrusOne's facility is outside the FEMA, 500 year flood plain, avoiding the severe flooding conditions in the Houston area. During Hurricane Ike and many other storms including Hurricane Rita in 2005 and Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, the building and surrounding areas did not flood. Its reinforced, concrete walls weathered the onslaught of winds exceeding 80 mph gusts. The walls are rated to withstand 200 mph winds and the roof Category 5 hurricane winds.
Over 2.1 million houses and businesses were without power immediately following the storm. In preparation for the storm, it turned on its nine backup generators in anticipation. It had over 56,000 gallons of fuel on site with an additional 3 diesel tankers on the campus in the event of an extended loss of utility power.
Typically overlooked in data center contingency plans, access to water was a concern. Most of Houston lost water for three days, which would shut down data centers with chilled water plants. CyrusOne has a closed loop system with air chillers that serve as a backup to the water plant, allowing it to run without water.
"Preparing for these types of events is part of the day-to-day operations for CyrusOne," CyrusOne data center operations vice president Kenneth Wolverton said in a statement. "In addition to all critical staff on site to monitor and respond to every component of the mechanical and electrical infrastructure, we had contractors and technicians from manufacturers overseeing every component of the facility around the clock and continued to be on site for several days. Sleeping accommodations, food, water and other provisions are on site year around as a proactive measure."
The Planet (theplanet.com) data center supervisor Eric Bush reported the status of its Houston data centers overnight as the storm descended on the city.
"Ticket load has been normal, all [data center] systems working flawlessly, and technicians doing upgrades/reboots/hardware changes," he wrote on the company's online forum. "We've been on utility power for a majority of the day...H1 is the data center which lost power and auto-switched to generation systems without a hitch. H2 shortly thereafter was manually pulled off the grid as a precautionary measure, also without any problems."
In preparation for the storm, The Planet brought in an additional 10,000 gallons of fuel as backup for its 10,000 Houston servers which could already remain powered for up to a week without any backup. It also moved some staff to its Dallas offices
Houston-based cPanel (cpanel.net) kept customers notified with updates on its website, writing that its Houston office was running in "emergency mode" and that staff would be limited as the storm passed. The company reported its phone systems would intermittently unavailable and customer response time would be longer than usual.
In response to disaster concerns, Houston-based iland (iland.com), a provider of VMware solutions, managed colocation, and high-speed IP Network and Data services, has added hosted VMware solutions to help make data centers hurricane-resistant and fully redundant.
According to they company's annoucement Tuesday, iland High Availability Hosted VMware Solutions allow customers to host multiple operating systems and applications in geographically dispersed data centers in the United States and Europe.
It has already deployed more than 250 virtual machines prior to its official launch including some which have experienced hurricanes.
"iland saved our business communications during and after hurricane Gustav," K-TEK (ktekcorp.com) network administrator Joseph Wiley, who oversees its facility in Prairieville, Louisiana. "They kept all our employees and divisions up and running worldwide, and our customers never knew we skipped a beat."
iland's fully redundant infrastructure is built in a VMware VI Enterprise environment on a VMware ESX platform, which offers redundancy at the hardware, network, and data center levels. Customers are offered a "stand by" option when preparing for disasters, where backup copies of virtual machines are made and sent to iland to be housed safely in its managed storage area network.
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