NORTH AMERICA DATA CENTER SITE SELECTION

The customer desired to consolidate multiple corporate data centers into a single North America Data Center.  We were enlisted to help develop criteria to be used for locating the new facility, conduct the search, and acquire the selected property.  We considered multiple options including, building on a greenfield site, purchase or lease existing buildings, and employing standard co-location strategies similar to those offered by typical data center service providers.  The team limited the search to locations between the two corporate hubs in the San Francisco Bay Area and Houston to minimize data transfer latency effects.  Search criteria included natural disaster risk, power cost, lifetime NPV,  estimated time to startup, and available tax incentives.  Facilities were required to be capable of providing a minimum critical power of 15MW with Tier IV redundancy.  Alternative properties were identified in Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Denver, Plano, San Antonio, and Richardson, TX.  Financial modeling was conducted for all of the identified alternatives (buy vs build vs lease vs co-location) to compare cash flows, capital requirements, and NPV.   Based on the financial and schedule analysis, the client chose to acquire an available core & shell building and complete the remaining build out.  Two identical 150,000 sf buildings, constructed by Stream Data Centers, were available in Plano and San Antonio, TX.  After negotiating tax incentives with Economic Development Agencies in both cities, the facility in San Antonio was selected and acquired.

SAN ANTONIO DATA CENTER