By TOM McLAUGHLIN
News & Record Staff
The Halifax County IDA and the data-hosting company it has partnered with to market the Riverstone Technology Park unveiled an ambitious plan Wednesday to add up to 300,000 square feet of data center space at the park.
Carpathia Hosting, based in Asburn, Va., also announced it has selected the Riverstone Technology Park as the company’s hub for mission-critical, virtually fail-safe data center services. Previously the company entered into a partnership with the IDA to market Riverstone to corporate and government clients. Carpathia’s CEO said yesterday this latest commitment gives his company the ability to quickly deliver if a customer comes forward with a request for data services.
“We see opportunities come in every day that people look at us and want the perfect turn-key solutions for their data needs,” said Rick Smith, chief executive officer of Carpathia. Riverstone “has a lot going for it” as a potential data center site, Smith said, and this deal enables Carpathia to “deliver something in four months rather than 18 months if we have to build it ourselves.
“It’s an opportunity and a hidden gem and we’re really excited about it,” said Smith.
Mike Eades, executive director of the Halifax County Industrial Development Authority, said that while no financial commitments have been made with Carpathia to expand the park, the company is actively seeking end users who could underwrite the expansion and “this is our best opportunity to market Riverstone.”
Eades said that since Carpathia started touting Riverstone to clients, “maybe ten” firms had come forward to express an interest in setting up operations in Halifax County.
Carpathia Hosting was integral in the chain of events that brought Electronic Data Services to Clarksville (see related story). EDS this week revealed it has won an $800 million contract to operate a data center out of the old Russell Stover candy factory for the Department of Homeland Security.
The Riverstone Technology Park has similar potential to attract large corporate or government customers, said Smith.
“We do a lot of work with big [data] integrators at the forefront of large RFPs [requests for proposals]” from enterprise customers such as the federal government or corporations, said Smith. “We’ve teamed successfully with a lot of these integrators and that puts us in the path of large opportunities coming along.” He listed EDS, General Dynamics, Oracle and Accenture as being among the company’s “thousands” of customers.
“We’re plugged in with all the key ingredients to make this happen,” said Smith. “We know the data side, we know the real estate side, and we know all the other players who build data centers.”
Smith said the best use of the Riverstone Technology Building would be as a mixed-use facility for a company needing a data center and support staff.
“The Riverstone building is a perfect sort of mixed-use building where you have a data center component and an office space component,” he said. Sometimes companies want to establish stand-alone “lights-out” data centers that are maintained and operated by only a few employees, but a better plan for Riverstone would be to find a tenant who would also move people into Riverstone’s office space.
“The building could easily support a couple of hundred productive bodies,” said Smith. “Our vision is that because it does have these office facilities, you wouldn’t just put a lights-out facility there.”
The plan announced by Carpathia and the IDA yesterday calls for adding 20,000 square feet of raised floor data at Riverstone Building One for a data center, complementing the office space already available at the building. Carpathia envisions finding a client who would first take over Building One, then commission all or part of the 300,000 square feet expansion for use as a larger data center.
“There’s room in that building where you could put an additional ten or twenty thousand square feet of data center [space] … and deliver the data center component in the existing building in a four month window, and allow someone to use that property and then we would start on a new building and go from there,” said Smith.
Smith said the plan was “speculative” and would depend on finding the right client, but he noted that “larger RFPs come out and they need a solution six months from now, not a year from now, and we could deliver a data center in four months. It gives us a huge leg up on the competition.”
At some point Carpathia may seek to purchase or lease Riverstone Building One to market to potential clients, said Smith. But for now the company is focused on finding enterprise customers who will use the company’s services for their data hosting needs.
Smith noted that “everybody has a web presence these days … and all these things need to be hosted on data centers.” Carpathia has thousands of clients, he said, but is relatively small in terms of number of employees. “We’re growing every day,” he said. “We’ve got 25, 26 people now and at the rate we’re going we’ll have 50 by this time next year.”
“We use technology to the fullest. What would have taken 10 people to do we can do with one by using technology,” he said.
The five-year plan announced yesterday by Carpathia and the IDA calls for the addition of 20,000 square feet of raised floor space — for the computers servers and equipment that power enterprise networks — plus the “design build and management of over 300,000 square feet of tier 3 and 4, high security raised floor and/or SCIF raised floor” in a separate building or buildings that would be built at the 165-acre Riverstone campus.
Tier 3 and 4 are industry standard designations for the most secure types of data centers; SCIF is short for secure compartmental information facility, another level required by entities that need highly stable and secure networks, Smith said.
Carpathia specializes in these high-end data network and storage services, which are a fast-growing part of the information technology market. The expansion at Riverstone would create “state-of-the-art facilities that enterprise and government [clients] would be comfortable moving into,” said Smith.
He said Southside Virginia is potentially an appealing location for government and corporate clients because it is close to Washington, DC but outside the “blast zone” of high-security targets.
Plus, Southside is a nice area, he said.
“We believe in the southern Virginia area and we’re a big part of bringing that other business [EDS] in, so it made sense to check out other localities that might be a good home for businesses in northern Virginia,” Smith said. “[Riverstone] has a lot going for it — it’s well connected from the fiber broadband perspective, it’s got the power redundancy and you’ve got an existing building …. Those kinds of opportunities are few and far between because it takes so many dollars to bring a property” to such a point, he said.
Riverstone, Smith added, “is just as connected as a building down the street [in northern Virginia]. It’s opened that market up for something that would be impossible normally to do in this area. There’s a lot to be said for being out of the rat race, with a lower cost of living, and being out of the blast zone.”
In a press release, Carpathia singled out the healthcare industry in particular as being “in need of a highly secure facility built to keep pace with the growing requirements for storage and security brought on by regulatory oversight.”
Carpathia also said it would conduct half-day campus tours with “major system integrators and healthcare providers in mid-October.”