Centeris Signs 7 Megawatt Lease in Seattle Data Center

Data center provider Centeris has leased up to 7 megawatts of IT capacity in its Puyallup, Washington facility to Colocation Northwest, the companies said this week. Colocation Northwest is a colocation service operated by IsoFusion, an internet access and IT services firm serving the Seattle area.

The large lease in the Centeris South Hill data center represent a major expansion of its Colocation Northwest’s operation. The company said the move was driven by customer demand for colocation and disaster recovery services.

“We look forward to bringing our vision for scalable, fully managed colocation solutions and integration to a new level,” said Stephen Milton, co-founder and CEO of Colocation Northwest. “Our commitment to Centeris allows us to offer the same customer-focused colocation services we’ve given customers for over 25 years, to the enterprise and wholesale markets.”

The lease is the largest deal yet for Centeris, a relatively new player in the Seattle-area data center landscape which operates in Puyallup, about 35 miles south of downtown Seattle. The leading wholesale player in the Seattle market has been Sabey Corp., which has a major campus in Tukwila. Both Digital Realty and Equinix have a major presence in Downtown Seattle. Other players in the region include Digital Fortress, Green House Data, Internap, H5 Data Centers and CenturyLink.

Benaroya Bets on Data Centers

Centeris is owned by The Benaroya Company, a commercial real estate company founded in 1956 that focuses on office and technology properties in the Pacific Northwest. In 2010 the company entered the data center market, creating mission-critical space at the 86-acre South Hill campus. The property had been operated by a series of semiconductor companies before Benaroya converted it to data center use.

The campus features the 56,000 square foot LEED Gold SH1 facility, along with a 176,000 square foot powered shell and an on-site substation that can support up to 50 megawatts of capacity. Last year Centeris and fiber specialist Wave opened the Transpacific Hub at the facility to connect companies in the Pacific Northwest to Asian markets. SH1 offers direct dark fiber access to the Westin Building, the primary carrier hotel in Downtown Seattle, as well as Colocation Northwest’s other data center locations in Redmond, Bellevue and Tacoma.

“We are pleased to welcome Colocation Northwest to our high performance Seattle Centeris SH1 data center,” said Centeris owner, Larry Benaroya. “We look forward to providing the redundancy, robust security and hyper-scalability to support Colocation Northwest’s commitment to operational excellence and growth.”