Ascent Enters Dallas Market With Storm-Hardened Data Center in Plano

The Dallas data center market will get another new player, as Ascent Corp. has opened a data center in Plano, a suburb about 20 miles north of downtown Dallas. Ascent is best known for its data center projects in the Chicago market, and believes there will be demand in the Dallas area for its build-to-suit wholesale facilities, which are hardened for disaster resiliency.

“Texas has been hit hard with severe weather, including heavy rainstorms, hail and tornadoes recently,” said Phil Horstmann, CEO of Ascent. “This is the perfect time for us to bring our enterprise class hardened facility to the market, which, with its EF5 hardening, is much more secure and reliable than standard facilities. Dallas is a premier data center market and our hardened facility offers a different type of product that is well suited for businesses seeking disaster recovery and continuity solutions in the Midwest.”

Cities in Texas have been hit by torrential rainstorms over the past two months, leading to major flooding in Houston and highway closures near Dallas.

Ascent says its DAL1 facility can withstand EF5 tornadoes with winds of up to 360 miles per hour. The building is outfitted with 15-inch reinforced concrete walls, a 13.5-inch reinforced concrete roof, and an 8,000-pound blast door at the dock area.The building is equipped with 2.7 MW of critical power with the ability to expand up to 7.2 MW. Space can be customized to tenant requirements, Ascent said.

Building Boom in Plano

The Dallas/Fort Worth market has been a favored location for cloud builders and their customers, leading many leading service providers to build new facilities to add capacity. The Dallas data center market absorbed 39 megawatts of demand in 2015, according to Datacenter Hawk, a Dallas-based research firm that tracks the availability of data center space.

The city of Plano has emerged as one of the leading beneficiaries of the data center building boom in the greater Dallas market. Three new data centers have opened in Plano over the past year, and three more are under construction.

Aligned Data Centers recently launched the first phase of a 30-megawatt facility in Plano, and Equinix opened the doors on its DA7 facility in March. Meanwhile, there are facilities under construction by Skybox Datcenters, Stream Data Centers and now T5, which announced this week that it will work with Lincoln Rackhouse to build a 150,000 square foot second phase of the company’s campus in Plano. Like Ascent, the three new projects will all offer wholesale data center space.

Dallas

Dallas has been one of the nation’s busiest data center markets in recent years, with strong demand spenning the range of data center product categories, including hyperscale providers, wholesale space and retail colocation. Here’s a look at some of the current projects:

• Digital Realty operates one of the nation’s largest data center campuses in Richardson, where it is reported to be developing an expansion of 470,000 square feet.
• RagingWire is building the first phase of a planned 1 million square foot data center campus in Garland.
• Facebook has begun building a 750,000 square foot campus in Fort Worth.
• CyrusOne has added capacity within its 500,000 square foot powered shell in Carrollton.
• T5 Data Centers has announced plans to convert a former hotel downtown into a 300,000 square foot data center.
• INFOMART is building out new wholesale space within its flagship carrier hotel at 1950 Stemmons, adding a meet-me room and 3 megawatts of new space..

Ascent Background

Headquartered in Saint Louis, Ascent specializes in advanced mission critical facilities and offers a broad range of delivery models spanning shell & core, build-to-suit, turnkey, and outsourced critical systems operations. Ascent’s clients include Fortune 500 firms, and service providers.

Ascent’s first enormous data center in Northlake, Ill. was fully leased to Microsoft Corp. The adjacent CH2 facility, a multi-tenant wholesale facility, is anchored by Comcast. Ascent is currently building its third development in Chicago, a multi-tenant facility in downtown Chicago. The company also has data center projects in St. Louis and Minneapolis.

And for further coverage, check out Data Center Frontier’s page dedicated to the Dallas Data Center Market, that will provide the latest stats and info on this quickly growing area that is continuing to experience a data center boom.