Data by design

QUINCY — Vantage Data Centers cut the ribbon on the final phase of its existing facility in Quincy on Oct. 18. Simon Casey, the company’s vice president of construction for the Western United States, said the construction expanded the data center to 777,000 square feet. All of that is occupied by one customer, Casey said. 

“We really saw a ramp-up in data activity, with COVID, online shopping, software as a service. Business transactions increased exponentially over the last five years. And then within (about) the last 12 to 18 months, we’ve seen this new thing called AI start to come up. And really, that’s where a lot of industries are putting substantive investment. And that requires a lot more computing power to run all those applications that everyone is looking into. So that’s kind of the evolution,” Casey said.

Expanding the facility took 15 months, including design, using a process Casey called progressive design-build.

“We would still be designing major elements of the project, even as we started in the ground. A more traditional design-build approach is that you give your contractor the design parameters, they go away and spend a lot of time designing, and then they build. So progressive design-build is one step ahead from a speed perspective,” Casey said. 

A data center represents the evolution of how businesses, and even individuals, use their computers.

“Originally every corporation in the world used to have their servers in their own IT room, or they had some other way of housing all their electronics equipment. Now everyone is posting on the cloud. The cloud is really data centers,” he said.

Rather than build their own data centers, some businesses lease space from a third party. That’s how Vantage, based in Santa Clara, Calif., got its start, Casey said. 

“You have, maybe, a multitude of different companies who have their computer servers inside those buildings. The difference with Vantage is that we’re deploying buildings on a vast scale. And now we’re at the point where we have single-user buildings,” he said.

What data center customers are looking for is a system that works, day or night, winter or summer, and simultaneously can accommodate various customers doing various tasks. The key is reliability, he said, and the facility has to be designed to be ready anytime the customer needs it.

As a result, the design has to take into account the location – and in this case, Quincy gets pretty hot in the summer, a little cold in the winter, and it’s desert so it’s dry. 

“There’s a lot of proprietary technology within our data centers, both from an electrical and mechanical perspective,” he said.

He cited cooling requirements as one example.

“Obviously there’s a lot of heat generated off computer servers inside the building, and that’s something that you’re working to keep cool at all times,” Casey said. 

An uninterruptible power supply also is crucial, which is why data centers have backup generators on-site, he said.

Data may travel fast, but when it travels a long distance it can slow down, Casey said, so data centers are built relatively close to customers to minimize the chance of a lag. 

“I won’t name any names, but there are several data centers under construction close to Pangborn Airport (in East Wenatchee). Those may be similar customers that we might do business with, depending on the geographical location. So really, customers are looking for both resilience and latency in their network designs. So we tend to work with our customers and make sure that we are building sites most appropriate to our customers’ needs,” Casey said.

Cheryl Schweizer may be reached via email at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.

    Simon Casey
 Courtesy photo/Vantage Data Centers