FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 25, 2009 Contact: John Ford, Sabey Data Centers, Sabey Corporation (206) 281-8700

Sabey Corporation will build a 525,000-square-foot data center in Quincy, Wash., which will provide a sister campus to the company’s data center that opened in East Wenatchee earlier this year.

Intergate.Quincy will be constructed and owned by Sabey Corporation and designed to accommodate enterprise-level customers, as well as colocation data center operations. The campus will occupy 40 acres, with three data center facilities. The groundbreaking is expected this summer.

Sabey decided to build the second campus after the success of Intergate.Columbia, the company’s first data center in North Central Washington, as well as the continued strong interest in leased data centers. Intergate.Columbia signed T-Mobile and VMware as tenants within a year of groundbreaking.
Several major companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask.com and Intuit, have opened large data centers in North Central Washington recently, drawn by the area’s low power rates, mild climate and receptive municipalities.

However, Sabey’s two campuses are the first designed to accommodate operators who prefer the ease of leasing rather than owning. Intergate.Columbia’s success also shows that large companies see no downside to locating their data centers at a distance from the companies’ core functions.

“It’s clear that the concept of leasing makes sense to major data center operators,” said John Ford, Director of Technology Real Estate for Sabey Corporation. ”Our tenants design their interior modifications, while we provide them the economies of scale for shell and core. We also offer the infrastructure and mechanical system options to make their operations and budgets much more efficient.”

Another key benefit, Ford said, is North Central Washington's dry, moderate weather that allows for cost-effective solutions like evaporative cooling. Combined with the much lower utility rates in Grant County, a data center can save several million dollars and more than 100 million kWh of power a year.

To demonstrate, a typical data center is a 20-megawatt legacy facility that requires 10 megawatts for the server and at least 10 megawatts for cooling, adding up to a fairly typical Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 2.0.

Compare that to Intergate.Quincy, which is designed to easily attain a PUE of 1.4 or less, which reduces the cooling requirement by 6 megawatts – an actual energy savings of approximately 120 million kWh/year.

The operator of a typical 20-megawatt data center would also save on electric rates at Intergate.Quincy. Paying much lower than the national average of $.07/kWH, an operator leasing at Intergate.Quincy in Grant County would save about $8.8 million a year. Combined with the energy efficiency savings, that’s a total savings of $10 million a year.

Those savings deliver a big impact: a company with a price-earnings ratio of 45 would see an increase of $450 million in market capitalization.

“What other decision will a data center executive make today that will increase the company’s value by nearly half a billion dollars?” Ford said.

Intergate.Quincy’s location in the Pacific Northwest has benefits other than low power costs. The campus is powered primarily from hydro generation, with some wind power. Because the campus is so close to power-generating dams, there is little, if any, line loss – energy wasted from transmission across power lines.

In an era of global warming, Intergate.Quincy will have virtually no carbon footprint. Since the facility is hydro-powered, there is no unavoidable emission of carbon dioxide – the most significant greenhouse gas created in the production of electricity.  With a network of dams and wind power, Washington state ranks 49th in the nation in carbon dioxide emissions per unit of electrical energy produced. And further contributing to green, efficient energy, the hydro dams’ output is kept artificially low to protect salmon. Intergate.Quincy will be designed and constructed by the same seasoned team that quickly and cost-effectively completed Intergate.Columbia. The team includes: Sabey Construction, Inc., Callison Architecture, The McKinstry Company, Veca Electrical, Engineers Northwest and ESW Consultants.

About Sabey Corporation
Sabey Corporation is a privately held Northwest company specializing in the design, building and operation of data centers in the Northwest, with 1.7 million square feet of mission-critical space occupied by government, universities and leading corporations. Sabey Data Centers serves some of the premier names in the world and recently completed SDC52, a wholesale colocation facility at the company’s Intergate.Seattle campus.

The 30-acre Intergate.Columbia campus includes two buildings totaling 430,000 square feet of data center space.

In its 38-year history, Sabey has built more than 27 million square feet of commercial space, much of it for technology industries and medicine. The company recently received acclaim for its innovative redevelopment of the Life Sciences Community at James Tower on Swedish Hospital’s Cherry Hill Campus in Seattle.

 

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