Denver looks to partake in data center surge.

• Author: Lindsay, Robert
• Position: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

AS THE U.S. MARKET FOR DATA CENTER real estate has skyrocketed, the Denver area has been largely overlooked, in favor of larger corporate markets like Dallas and northern Virginia. But there are signs that Denver may soon become a major growth area for additional data center development.

"Interest in our area has definitely picked up in the last six months," says Laura Brandt, a manager for the Denver Economic Development Corp. "We are currently working with site selectors who represent data center companies and enterprise users that are evaluating our area. Over the next three years, I expect we will see more data center activity in our market."

Many factors make Denver a prime region for data center development. The area has a low propensity for natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes and floods. It also has a highly educated labor force that allows companies to hire skilled technical workers.

Also, Denver's mountain climate provides up to 8,000 hours of free, environmental cooling per year. Except in the hottest summer clays, data centers can easily cool their facilities by pumping outside air into the building. This greatly offsets the need for massive amounts of power to electrically cool the facilities, and helps to provide a lower TCO for tenants.

"Data-center companies like the fact that they can fly in to the Denver International Airport in a couple of hours, from virtually anywhere in the country and view their infrastructure," Brandt says. "They also like that Denver has a single satellite bounce for data."

"The Denver region is an important North American fiber relay point," says Billie Haggard, senior vice president of Data Centers at CoreSite, a Denver-based data center company. "It features an IT-centric corporate presence as well as numerous large IT and telecommunications service providers."

Currently, the Denver area has about 2.9 million square feet of data center space. About 1.2 million square feet is operated by retail coloration companies, such as Denver-based ViaWest, Latisys and ForTrust. These operators typically lease cabinets and caged space to companies who wish to store their servers in a managed coloration environment. An additional 1 million square feet of data center space is owned or operated by private enterprise users, such as IBM, Lockheed Martin and TIAA-CREF.

The Denver market has one available data center that is designed...