January 18th, 2013 by Robert Powell
CoreSite (NYSE:COR, news, filings) unveiled plans for a large new data center campus in the New York metro area this morning. The data center REIT is acquiring an existing 280,000 square foot building on 10 acres of land in Secaucus NJ. They plan to develop the property into a new data center campus, with that initial building going by the moniker NY2 – its sixteenth nationally. It will complement CoreSite’s other area facility at 32 Ave of the Americas across the river quite nicely.
CoreSite hopes to close the deal in February and start converting the building in Q1, bringing the first phase of 65,000 square feet online in Q4. The pricetag for that much will be $65M, with later phases offering up to 18MW of capacity and additional buildings possible on the rest of the property. CoreSite’s move comes just a bit over a week after they amended and increased their revolving credit facility to $355M. Clearly they weren’t doing so idly.
Several fiber operators are already making plans to bring CoreSite’s NY2 facility on-net. Sidera Networks in particular has been on a data center connectivity crusade for a year now (remember this industry spotlight with Clint Heiden), and they’ve always had a special interest in and around the New York financial markets. They’ll be bringing their ultra-low latency Xtreme network into the facility, and adding another critical on-ramp into the cloud ecosystem. Sidera recently agreed to merge with its regional rival Lightower in a surprise announcement just after Christmas, bringing the coverage of two of the region’s densest fiber networks under one roof. I’m not sure the industry has fully grasped the meaning of that deal just yet, but the eggnog will wear off soon.
Zayo has also committed to building out its fiber into CoreSite’s NY2 facility to offer dark fiber, waves, Ethernet, and IP services. After buying AboveNet in last year’s other blockbuster fiber deal (seems so long ago now), Zayo suddenly became one of the biggest players in the New York metro area and the financial vertical. Just last month Zayo announced they had all of CoreSite’s facilities online nationally, so one more seems like a natural enough move for them – especially for one in Secaucus.
Interestingly, the third fiber operator that has already committed to serve the Secaucus campus is one that doesn’t actually have any fiber yet. Seaborn Networks is in the process of building a giant US-Brazil submarine cable, and connections to both CoreSite NY1 and NY2 will be part of their full mesh backhaul and PoP footprint to go with its Seabras-1 cable system in Q1 of 2015. It’s a bit early for them perhaps, but a little over a week ago they got Alcatel-Lucent ships started on the marine survey so they’re way ahead of the other various cables to Brazil that have been bandied about. Interestingly, Sidera has also announced early plans to buy capacity on Seabras-1 already – small world.
CoreSite also moved to expand its cloud ecosystem today with the Open Cloud Exchange. They’re bringing in best of breed partnerships to improve interconnection capabilities between cloud participants. CENX, RightScale, RiverMeadow Software, and Brocade are on the initial list.
Posted on 18th January 2013