Flexential Steps Up Building Program for 2022

March 22, 2022
Flexential will step up its building program for 2022. The company plans to expand its data center platform by adding 33 megawatts (MWs) of capacity, more than double the rate of expansion compared to 2021.

Colocation and hybrid cloud provider Flexential will step up its building program for 2022. The company plans to expand its data center platform by adding 33 megawatts (MWs) of capacity, more than double the rate of expansion compared to 2021. Flexential expects to finish the year with over 220 MWs and 3 million square feet of capacity across 19 markets.

Flexential also outlined three new preconfigured blueprints designed to accelerating customer hybrid IT deployments, improving infrastructure performance and reducing latency to public clouds, partners and customers.

CEO Chris Downie said Flexential is seeking to step up its game in a period of active evolution for IT infrastructure.

“As we all reflect on the challenges of the past two years and look to the future to accommodate new realities, driving growth has never been a more complicated mission,” said Downie. “Traditional playbooks will not suffice. Companies must reimagine what it takes to meet the needs of their teams and their end-users.”

That strategy includes several expansions of data center infrastructure:

  • Flexential has started construction on the first phase of a new highly-sustainable data center in the Atlanta market. At full build out, Atlanta-Douglasville will offer more than 150,000 square feet of IT space and 22.5 MWs of power capacity, and will showcase company’s latest energy- and water-efficient Gen 5 design.
  • Flexential also said it has completed construction of its largest project in Oregon. The 36MW Hillsboro 3 data center now offers customers in Portland access to 358,000 square feet of space to address strong demand.
  • The national platform expansion also builds on recently announced projects in the Denver, CO and Dallas, TX markets.

As it has grown beyond its roots as a regional provider, Flexential has built a national footprint and global connectivity. With its theme of “beyond four walls,” the company is targeting customers that need to connect across markets, and operates a private 100 GB network for its data centers.

The Atlanta and Hillsboro projects are the latest in a series of expansions and growth for Flexential, which recently raised $2.1 billion through an offering of asset-backed securities.  Flexential said the funding “dramatically improves the company’s investment grade credit profile, lowers the cost of capital, and allows Flexential to deploy greater data center capacity to meet accelerating demands in new and existing markets.”

Flexential will also invest in adding further direct access to all major public cloud providers across its national private backbone in 2022. Through the Flexential Cloud Fabric, customers can reduce reliance on the public Internet for cloud connectivity and leverage a self-service portal to manage connections to cloud platforms like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

That move reflects a trend among leading colocation providers want to “cloudify” the colocation experience by equipping their data centers with programmable infrastructure, enabling customers to blend physical and virtual assets across technologies and geographies. This is driven by the rise of cloud computing, which has altered user expectations for how digital infrastructure is delivered. In an “as-a-service” world, customers expect to provision servers quickly through online services.

The three new FlexAnywhere blueprints are specifically designed to address key customer pain points, including scalability, application performance and reliability, and network performance and interconnection.

“We’re excited that Flexential is providing practical blueprints and support that will help our partners more rapidly address the pain points our joint customers face,” said Shane McNamara, EVP of Operations and Engineering, AVANT.” The FlexAnywhere solutions provide a highly scalable approach that will allow our partners to deploy hybrid IT projects for our customers with headroom for future growth.”

About the Author

Rich Miller

I write about the places where the Internet lives, telling the story of data centers and the people who build them. I founded Data Center Knowledge, the data center industry's leading news site. Now I'm exploring the future of cloud computing at Data Center Frontier.

Sponsored Recommendations

Optimizing AI Infrastructure: The Critical Role of Liquid Cooling

In this executive brief, we discuss the growing need for liquid cooling in data centers due to the increasing power demands of AI and high-performance computing. Discover how ...

AI-Driven Data Centers: Revolutionizing Decarbonization Strategies

AI hype has put data centers in the spotlight, sparking concerns over energy use—but they’re also key to a greener future. With renewable power and cutting-edge cooling, data ...

Bending the Energy Curve: Decoupling Digitalization Trends from Data Center Energy Growth

After a decade of stability, data center energy consumption is now set to surge—but can we change the trajectory? Discover how small efficiency gains could cut energy growth by...

AI Reference Designs to Enable Adoption: A Collaboration Between Schneider Electric and NVIDIA

Traditional data center power, cooling, and racks aren’t sufficient for GPU-based servers arranged in high-density AI clusters...

Courtesy of Stream Data Centers
Image courtesy of Stream Data Centers

The Rise of the “Fake” Data Center Developer — And How to Tell the Difference

Stream Data Centers’ Co-Managing Partners expand on the problem of “fake” data center developers and explain how investors and end users can separate the wheat from the chaff....

White Papers

Dcf Schneider64 Wp Cover 2022 02 10 9 39 54 230x300

Why Data Centers Must Prioritize Environmental Sustainability: Four Key Drivers

Feb. 11, 2022
Energy efficiency has been a top priority for data center colocation providers over the past twenty years. Now, sustainability is a priority. In this white paper, Schneider Electric...