Data Centers Making Waves In ATL

So, in case you haven't yet crawled out from under your holiday rock, we have a little event this week: Our 2nd Annual Atlanta Data Center Outlook (click for tickets here). So to give us a warm up, we asked a couple of our panelists what's hot in the industry and for Atlanta. T5's SVP Tim Bright says leasing in Atlanta is picking up. Most recently the firm inked a deal to give insurance provider Unum data center storage at its T5@Atlanta facility in Alpharetta. "I can tell you right now we have proposals out," Tim says, that can chew into another 3MW of power at its 9MW facility.

But T5 has been looking beyond T5@Atlanta (seen here) with possible plans to go spec in Colorado and Portland (or they're just saying that as an excuse to go on a business trip to ski) and also just having purchased a former Sony data center in Briarcliff Manor in NY as a value-add play.

Another of our panelists for our upcoming data center conference in Atlanta is Colo Atlanta's Tim Kiser, who tells us his facility at 55 Marietta St (in the heart of Downtown) is now 75% full. And ColoAtlanta isn't looking to expand at this point.

We asked him about trends he's seeing now with his customer base and it's all about mobility when it comes to data center demand. Smart phones are raising capacity needs across the board. "You can watch movies now on your smartphone," he says. And that comes at the price of bandwidth for companies, even smaller companies, which are a big portion of ColoAtlanta's clientele.