Equinix Nabs New LA Data Center

Equinix Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), a supplier of data center facilities for service providers and enterprises, says its customers face so much end-user demand that it's stumped up $34.5 million for a new facility in Los Angeles (see Equinix Buys Data Center).

The new data center, which is Equinix's 17th, formerly belonged to Exodus Communications, which is now part of , another vendor gunning for enterprise data center services (see Egenera Cuts Big Blade Deal and Savvis Sells Virtual Switch Savvy). With 200 service provider clients, Equinix aims to meet growing customer needs for a range of services, including managed services in areas such as security, disaster recovery, and business continuity.

Speaking on a conference call yesterday, Equinix CEO Peter Van Camp cited customer power, cooling, and security requirements as drivers for his company's new data center. Many service providers are wrestling with the power demands of 10-Gbit/s Ethernet and enterprises are wrestling with blade server power demands, according to Equinix execs (see Vegas Blade Warning and Internet2 Selects Force10).

As our customers start to migrate to 10-gigabit, they are putting more and more hardware in. They are replacing 1-gigabit cards with 10-gigabit cards, and that is adding to their power requirements,” said Margie Backaus, Equinix’s chief business officer.

Backaus said that many service providers are also deploying large routers to support peering with other networks, which means even more power consumption. But Backaus thinks the new LA data center should be equal to this task. With more than 5.5 megawatts running into the 107,000-square-foot site, this is double the power of some other similarly sized facilities, according to the exec.Closely linked to power is cooling, which has also prompted carriers to consider shifting their kit to specially-designed data centers, such as those Equinix offers (see QualityHosting Picks Interxion).

Did we mention security? Service providers, which make up a third of Equinix's customers, are well positioned as the managers of global networks to have the widest understanding of security threats (see Managed Security Services Pipe Up). A number of service providers, such as AT&T Corp. (NYSE: T) and Equant