Earlier this month power outages in Greenwich and Stamford set many businesses back a day, with no access to computer systems, email or phones.
A year from now, that may not be the case if the electricity goes out.
Cervalis L.L.C., an information-technology infrastructure provider, is building a data- and disaster-recovery center in Norwalk.
The first floor of the 168,000-square-foot facility will house servers to run clients”™ day-to-day IT operations and the second floor will be reserved for businesses to use as an office in case there is ever a power outage or disaster.
“It enables companies to continue as if nothing happened under a dire circumstance,” said Zack Margolis, vice president of Cervalis.
Construction is set to begin shortly on the site at 10 Norden Place. Servers will be up and ready to use by approximately the third quarter of 2013.
The Shelton-based company has raised $75 million in funding for the new data center and to refinance its existing debt. The lease is the largest build-to-suit agreement in Fairfield County in more than 10 years and the largest transaction this year.
In a down real estate market, the project is big news, said Howard Greenberg, president of Howard Properties Ltd. of White Plains, N.Y. Greenberg has represented Cervalis in each of its leases. In this lease, Greenberg partnered with John Stoddard, vice president of Jones Lang LaSalle of Stamford. Jodie Dostal, senior director of Cushman & Wakefield of CT Inc., represented the landlord FPG Norden DC.
The last build-to-suit project in Fairfield County of this size was in 2001 for the global management consultant firm Hewitt Associates in Norwalk. The building at 45 Glover Ave. measures 250,000 square feet and cost roughly $24 million, according to Emporis building information. Xerox Corp. made the building its current headquarters in 2007.
For Norwalk, the new building will bring construction jobs, a new business and additional tax revenue. And for businesses, it will bring a state-of-the-art facility into the neighborhood that they can actually use, Greenberg said.
With businesses dependent on technology for everything they do, Cervalis is one of the fastest growing companies in Connecticut. It provides infrastructure for rapid recovery, hosting, cloud computing, security measures, storage and telecommunications. Its clients range from small emerging companies to large Fortune 500 corporations from retail and insurance to education.
“This saves businesses the need to spend their own money buying this type of infrastructure,” Margolis said. “They can use that money to grow their business and our servers to run their IT.”
The new center will have back-up power generators, redundant wiring, 50,000 square feet of raised floors, 16 megawatts of utility power and 3,500 tons of cooling capacity. The building will be staffed by an additional 25 employees for the company, allowing technicians and engineers to be available for customer support 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
This is the 12-year-old company”™s fourth expansion and the new building will bring its total real estate footprint up to 470,000 square feet. Outside of Norwalk, it has leased space in Stamford, Shelton, Dutchess County, N.Y., and Totowa, N.J.
