Server farms sprouting in Silicon Valley

In the past four years, 11 large independent data centers have been built or are being planned in Santa Clara County. Among them:

• A new 360,000-square-foot center in Santa Clara built by DuPont Fabros Technology that has room for tens of thousands of servers. Its 16 large computer rooms and 16 smaller ones are backed up by 32 diesel generators fed by two 50,000-gallon fuel tanks; 32 rotary power systems kick in if there’s a power outage. The cooling system includes 16 chillers and two 500,000 gallon tanks filled with chilled water.
• A former 18-acre Intel (INTC) data center and campus in Santa Clara that was acquired by Vantage Data Centers last year is being expanded into a larger server farm. Vantage was started by private equity firm Silver Lake.
• Several new centers operated by Digital Realty Trust, which has a total of 22 centers covering 1.8 million square feet in Silicon Valley. The company started in Menlo Park as a private equity partnership in 2001 and is now headquartered in San Francisco.
• San Jose’s distinctive downtown "gold building" at 55 S. Market is now home to a data center operated by Denver-based CorSite.

  Likely tenants for the buildings, gleaned through filings and industry reports, include Facebook, Apple (AAPL), Zynga, and other Internet leaders with a growing need for servers to store and retrieve data.

  The centers in the valley are a small portion of the millions of square feet of data centers that valley companies have built in lower cost places like Oregon, Washington and North Carolina — wherever it’s cool or power is relatively cheap — in the U.S. and around the world. While land here is expensive, analysts say companies based in the valley want some data center space near their headquarters. The temperate climate, which lowers cooling costs, is another selling point. So is access to the valley’s skilled engineers.

  "We’re the tech innovator of the globe," said Jerry Inguagiato of CB Richard Ellis, a commercial real estate services company. "That’s why data centers are here."

  "Silicon Valley represents a unique opportunity for us to reach technical talent and technical expertise," said Allan Leinwand, game company Zynga’s chief technology officer for infrastructure. Zynga plans to spend $100 million to $150 million this year on building its infrastructure, according to a public filing.

  Leinwand declined to comment on where Zynga’s servers are located.

  The valley’s big data centers servers run "mission critical" applications that can’t be interrupted without causing serious disruptions. Customers prefer keeping a low profile.

  "The owner of a facility doesn’t necessarily want to have the address or name of the building out in the world, because what they’re doing is very secretive," said Brett Boncher, project manager at Cupertino Electric, which installs data center electrical systems. "But you’d be hard-pressed to go three miles here without passing some type of data center. "They’re all over the place."

  "What is fueling the build-out of infrastructure is a demand for more computing power," said Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Fremont-based Grid Dynamics, an authority on cloud computing technologies. "The types of things people are putting on the Internet and the amount of data produced in world is staggering and the rate by which it is created is accelerating."

  About 20 data centers are clustered around a 147-megawatt power station operated by the city of Santa Clara. The city says it can sell electricity to large customers at a discount, a selling point because the centers require so much electricity.

  Santa Clara also operates a 57-mile fiber ring that connects the centers to the outside world.

  "Ten years ago, most companies had their servers and their data centers inside their own facilities," said Larry Owens, customer services manager at Santa Clara’s Silicon Valley Power.

  "But demand for data and connectivity and trafficking outgrew the space they had. These new independent buildings started to appear that were suited for data center operations."

  The cost can run from $1,000 to $1,500 per square foot or more for the rooms — called "raised floors" — that house the servers, according to industry experts.

  "The cloud isn’t this big fluffy area up in the sky," said Rich Miller, who edits Data Center Knowledge, a publication that follows the data center industry. "It’s buildings filled with servers and generators."