"Vantage Data Centers recently announced the completion of its first data center in Quincy, Washington for an enterprise customer. The campus comprises a 68-acre area with close access to hydropower, providing the facility with an abundant, low cost energy source. Additionally, the campus location leads to added benefits for the data centers as well as the city itself.
“Quincy benefits from lower power costs,” said research analyst Rick Kurtzbein. “With abundant hydroelectric power, network connectivity, tax incentives and low risks of natural disasters, Quincy is an emerging datacenter market for enterprises and web companies for either primary datacenter sites or for secondary, disaster recovery sites. The Quincy market allows for lower, ongoing operational costs that benefit datacenter providers, as well as customers in their facilities.”
The design for the building was meant to be highly scalable, with the capacity to include four data center service buildings with a combined space of 529,000 square feet and 55 megawatts of critical IT load.
The first data center will be located on 25 acres and support up to 9 MW at full capacity. The facility itself contains 61,000 square feet of raised floor space and is designed to operate at an efficient 1.3 annual power usage effectiveness.
Uptime Institute certification and environmental impact
Vantage also worked to meet engineering and reliability standards set by the Uptime Institute, and is one of just 51 data centers to be recognized with institute tier certification in the United States, according to the Uptime Institute. Vantage’s Quincy data center received Tier III certification as well as design documents certification from Uptime. Data centers of this tier must have redundant capacity components and dual-powered equipment and multiple hardware uplinks. Additionally, tier III data centers must be able to guarantee 99.982 percent availability.
“This collaborative approach, completed with the Uptime Institute’s capability to recognize trends on a global basis and to interface directly with owners, results in solutions and invocations freed from regional constraints for the benefit of worldwide data center industry,” stated the website.
Vantage’s certification with the Uptime institute puts them in company with data centers of other major enterprise organizations, including US Bancorp, UnitedHealth Group, Target Corporation, Compass Datacenters, Verizon Wireless and CyrusOne.
The Quincy campus was also designed with the local environment in mind. Equipment includes a custom cooling system, which eliminates outdoor condition impacts via a closed loop delivery infrastructure. Additionally, the data centers have EPA Tier 4 generators to reduce emissions by up to 95 percent and LED lighting to lower energy use.
“The completion of the Quincy project in support of a large enterprise customer marks the opening of Vantage’s second data center campus,” said Vantage president ant CEO Sureel Choksi. “Consistent with the company’s Santa Clara campus, the Vantage Quincy campus has been designed for massive scalability, high energy efficiency and operational excellence in support of large enterprises and web companies.”"
