QTS Realty Trust shows progress on Dallas facility

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1 QTS Realty Trust shows progress on Dallas facility Analyst: Glenn Ford Rick Kurtzbein 9 Jan, 2014 We recently visited the Quality Technology Services (QTS) Dallas Data Center, a new development site in Irving, a suburb of Dallas, to see how the redevelopment effort was progressing. The firm acquired the site of a former semiconductor manufacturing plant in Q The plant sits on a 40-acre plot and has a dual-fed power substation on-site that provides 140MW of utility power from the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport power grid. The four buildings on the site have roughly 700,000 square feet of space with the ability to double the footprint on the existing campus to 1.4 million square feet. The company expects to deliver the first phase by July The 451 Take With Dallas' diverse economy driving healthy MTDC demand and a supply/demand imbalance, the city remains one of the top markets in the US and we have believed for a while that there was room in the Dallas market for more competitors. Other providers have recognized this with the relatively recent entries of T5 Data Centers and now QTS entering the market. Providers in Dallas and other MTDC markets continue to build out datacenters in phases as QTS is doing with its new Dallas facility, which is a rational approach so as not to add too much capacity to the market ahead of demand. Once the Dallas datacenter is open, QTS will have a presence in five of the top 10 North American markets. We have cited before that companies are actively focused on architecting multi-location offerings with additional resilience through options of load balancing and geographic failover. We expect that QTS will find success in Dallas with its new datacenter and would not be surprised to see the company expand in new markets in the future. Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 Context Overland Park, Kansas-based QTS offers a complete portfolio of datacenter products and fully managed services, which includes custom datacenter, colocation and wholesale datacenter as well as cloud and managed services. In October 2013, QTS Realty Trust completed its IPO with a debut on the New York Stock Exchange and became a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). The company priced its offering at $21 per share, below the target range of $27-30, and raised $257.25m in gross proceeds. QTS Realty Trust has executed on a rapid growth strategy over the past several years, with the acquisition of two former semiconductor manufacturing plants for redevelopment into datacenter facilities. The company also acquired colocation provider Herakles in Q1 2013, adding a 52,600-square-foot datacenter in Sacramento to its datacenter footprint. In April 2010, QTS entered the Virginia market, acquiring a former 1.3-million-square-foot Qimonda semiconductor manufacturing campus in Henrico County near Richmond, Virginia's airport. QTS has undertaken several redevelopment projects, including the semiconductor plant in the Dallas; in November 2012 the company opened the Richmond datacenter, which is the former Qimonda semiconductor manufacturing facility; and QTS's large midtown Atlanta datacenter is a former Sears distribution center, which was acquired in QTS has 10 datacenter properties located in Atlanta, Georgia; Suwanee, Georgia; Dallas, Texas; the San Francisco Bay Area (Santa Clara); New York metro (New Jersey); Richmond, Virginia; Sacramento, California; Wichita and Overland Park, Kansas; and Miami, Florida. The company has a total built datacenter footprint consisting of 713,513 square feet of datacenter space, 626,496 square feet of supporting infrastructure, and 78,044 square feet of office and other space. Strategy The brownfield development project of the former manufacturing plant will be delivered in phases. The site has four interconnected buildings, which will house datacenter facilities, comfort amenities, offices and conference rooms. The datacenter will be built out in phases, with the first series of data halls spanning three levels to be located in the largest of the four buildings, which was the previous main manufacturing area. The campus' buildings also include the option for a powered shell for a large enterprise tenant. The building at the back of the property will house the equipment rooms. The main facility security entrance, conference rooms and offices will be located building nearest to Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 the property entrance. Work on the site to date includes updating and reconditioning the power substation on the property, which was initially build in the '90s; and stripping the buildings down in preparation for the datacenter retrofit. The first phase is planned to open H with two data halls totaling 8MW of critical IT load. The features planned for the datacenter include: Carrier-neutral facility Diverse path/diverse fiber network connections Access to the area's numerous network providers Private data suites/ wholesale datacenter options York chillers with 25,000 tons of capacity in a dual closed loop system Water side economizers Hot aisle/cold aisle airflow management Dual entry/dual path, on-site 70MVA substation fed by two separate 138kV feeds supplied by Encor N+1 power generators N+1 CRACs in data halls Dual A/B power to the floor N+1 block redundant static UPS Photonic fire detection in mechanical and common areas Dual interlock pre-action dry pipe fire suppression with very early smoke detection apparatus (VESDA) Internal and external security cameras Perimeter fencing with secure entrance gates, secure parking and a rear privacy wall Mantraps at main entry point; card and two-factor biometric authentication at all data hall entry points Security officers 24/7, with active patrols both inside and outside the facility Competition The Dallas market continues to see steady growth in the multi-tenant datacenter sector, with growing enterprise demand for wholesale and colocation datacenter space. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex has an abundance of fiber connectivity throughout from top providers such as AT&T, Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 Verizon, Level 3 Communications and CenturyLink. These connections along with interconnection availability to 2323 Bryan Street and the INFOMART allow providers to use space outside downtown in the suburbs of Irving, Carrollton, Richardson, Plano and Lewisville to build new facilities. The demand for capacity in Dallas is driving datacenter expansions and new build activity, and we are seeing new providers enter the market. We do not believe that Dallas will suffer from excess capacity because providers are building in phases to control the amount of capacity added to the market. As a result of continued supply growth and new entrants in the market, providers have seen some pricing pressure. Most providers are reporting no major change to their pricing structures and little disruption in the competitive landscape. In Dallas, QTS can expect competition on the wholesale front from Digital Realty Trust, CyrusOne, T5 Data Centers and Stream Data Centers. QTS will also face competition from a number of colocation providers including CyrusOne, DataBank, Equinix, Internap Network Services, Telx, ViaWest and many others. At a nationwide level, the company sees competition from providers such as SunGard, Savvis and Terremark, along with regional competition in certain markets. In the wholesale datacenter space, QTS vies with a number of providers in North America, including CyrusOne, Digital Realty Trust, DuPont Fabros Technology, Sabey Data Centers, Stream Data Centers and T5 Data Centers. Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Daily T1R. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 5