Houston Business Journal – February 23, 2007
By Mary Ann Azevedo

The increased use of blade servers among companies of all kinds has led CyrusOne to kick off a major expansion of its southwest Houston data center. The privately held provider of managed hosting, co-location and managed IT services will spend between $40 million and $50 million to nearly double the size of its 4201 Southwest Freeway location -- from 65,000 to 125,000 square feet.

The new facility will be connected to an existing one, according to CyrusOne President and CEO Dave Ferdman. The first 10,000 square feet of the 60,000-square-foot expansion will come online this summer. Overall, the new campus -- which also houses the Houston-based firm's headquarters operations -- is being engineered to have a total of 31 megawatts of power, compared to nine megawatts currently.

"We've sold out our power," explains Ferdman, who says he can't predict when the expansion will be completely built out because there will be different specifications for some phases as hardware requirements change.

"One of the main drivers behind the need for more space, according to Ferdman, is that more companies are adopting the use of blade servers. Many data centers built before 2005, he says, were not engineered with enough power or air conditioning to accommodate blade servers. A blade server houses a number of individual, minimally packaged computer motherboard "blades," each including one or more processors, memory, storage and network connections, but sharing the common power supply and air-cooling resources of the chassis.

"Most companies are using platforms that have to be available 100 percent of the time," Ferdman says. "What CyrusOne has done is focus on the Houston marketplace, which is very progressive in that companies here, especially in the energy sector, are early adopters of these blade servers. ... They either have to build on their own or outsource to CyrusOne."

Ted Chamberlain, research director of enterprise network communications for Gartner Inc., points out that an increase from nine megawatts of power to 31 is significant. "This underscores a major issue in this market," he says. "With the advent of blade servers, so many people have high-density computer equipment packed into a smaller footprint ... They need the proper spacing and cooling, as the servers throw out a lot of heat, and this is requiring all of these co-location guys to retrofit their power and cooling capabilities."

Houston-based VeriCenter Inc. also performs co-location services, although that company is more focused on managed hosting. Chamberlain says, that, in general, Houston in not a major market for co-location.

This article was originally published online at Houston Business Journal

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