LEESBURG, Va. – RagingWire Data Centers has begun building an additional 500,000 square feet of space in Ashburn, Virginia. The expansion was announced by RagingWire Director of Marketing Jim Leach at the recent CAPRE Mid-Atlantic Data Center Summit.
Leach said RagingWire has begun work on two new buildings – known as VA4 and VA5 – on its newest data center campus in Ashburn, in the heart of Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley, where nearly all the industry’s leading players are building new facilities to meet unprecedented demand from cloud computing providers.
The expansion positions RagingWire to continue to compete for deals in Ashburn, where the ability to deliver data center capacity quickly is an important requirement. Over the past several years, RagingWire has been retooling its data center construction operation to accelerate its deployment capabilities.
VA4 and VA5 will be nearly twins, with each two-story building containing 253,000 square feet of space. Construction on VA4 is underway and scheduled for completion in summer 2019. RagingWire will also lay the concrete pad and complete other site work for VA5, which will be available within six to nine months of a customer commitment.
RagingWire did not announce any new customer wins, but like many data center providers, it typically doesn’t start construction without a commitment from an anchor tenant.
Creating a Flexible Data Center Campus
The plans for VA4 and VA5 reflect the evolution of RagingWire’s data center design as it focuses on a mix of enterprise and hyperscale users.
In its first two Ashburn facilities, RagingWire built its data center infrastructure inside existing powered shells, with its vaults (data halls) averaging 2 megawatts in capacity. With its new campus, RagingWire has shifted to greenfield construction, customized from the ground up to support the company’s vision for Internet-scale campuses. The new Ashburn campus is designed to support seven interconnected buildings housing 1.5 million square foot of data center space.
The first building, VA3, featured a mix of vault designs, offering flexible sizing options from 2 megawatts to 6 megawatts of power capacity for enterprises seeking wholesale data center suites, as well as a large room for multi-tenant retail colocation.
A data vault inside the RagingWire VA3 data center in Ashburn, Virginia. (Photo: Rich Miller)
With VA4 and VA5, RagingWire is focusing on larger customers, with each building housing four 35,000 square-foot mega-vaults. This tracks with the recent trend towards larger data halls to meet the growing appetites of cloud computing operators and social media companies. Between the three data centers on the new campus, RagingWire will be able to accommodate everything from retail colocation customers to hyperscale players seeking up to 32 megawatts of space.
This flexibility is important, given RagingWire’s aspirations in both the enterprise and hyperscale markets. The company is owned by Japanese telecom giant NTT, providing RagingWire access to a base of global customers, many of whom may have interest in placing IT equipment in uber-connected Data Center Alley. The NTT relationship also provides RagingWire with deep pockets and a low cost of capital, which is helping fuel its growth.
RagingWire currently has 177 megawatts of critical IT power spread across 2 million square feet of data center infrastructure in Ashburn, Virginia; Dallas, Texas; and Northern California with significant growth plans in these locations and other top North American data center markets.
