Fortune Data Centers Expands to Oregon

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 21, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Fortune Data Centers, which provides premium wholesale data center space for corporate customers, announced today that the company is expanding beyond Silicon Valley to the Portland area of Oregon.

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"Oregon has no sales tax and, in the Enterprise Zones, no business property tax," said Jill Miles, national recruitment officer, Business Oregon. "This constitutes a large savings for capital intensive businesses like data centers, which buy expensive IT equipment and then must replace it regularly."

"We chose Oregon because it has excellent energy and communications infrastructure as well as a favorable tax structure for capital investment.   For example, tenants who update and replace IT equipment pay no sales tax, which translates into as much as 30% yearly savings for their data center operations," said Matt Mochary, CEO of Fortune Development Group. "By locating in an Enterprise Zone, our tenants will reap the same cost benefits experienced by the biggest Internet companies building their own data centers in Oregon, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon."

In May 2011, Fortune purchased a 15-acre site with a 240,000 square foot industrial building in an Enterprise Zone of Hillsboro, OR, which is just outside of Portland. "We are already over 55,000 man hours into the Phase 1 construction project, which will produce 7.8 MW of critical load capacity," Mochary added.  "At completion, the data center is expected to add 20-40 full time jobs in addition to tenant employees, and in a building that was vacant for five years." Phase 1 is expected to be completed and Level 5 commissioned by the second quarter of 2012.

"Datacenter siting exercises are looking beyond just local business presence to factors such as power costs, tax implications, and fiber availability," said Jason Schafer, Research Manager for Tier1 Research. "Large companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Facebook have blazed the trail and other, smaller companies are looking for similar advantages. Oregon presents compelling benefits in this regard and is likely to gain momentum as a viable datacenter location in the coming years."

Building on the Success of Fortune San Jose

In April 2009, Fortune commenced operations of its San Jose data center facility, with the ambition to be an industry leader in efficiency and innovation. The facility was fully leased within months of commissioning and has operated with 100% uptime since inception.  In addition to providing industry leading power usage effectiveness (PUE), Fortune was also the first multi-tenant data center to achieve LEED Gold certification and the first to extend the benefits of Direct Access power purchasing.

"We are applying everything we've learned from building the San Jose facility," said John Sheputis, CEO of Fortune Data Centers.  "Fortune's Oregon data center will provide an unprecedented level of efficiency and cost-savings for tenants, taken from a long list of industry firsts in the San Jose data center. The Oregon project is an extension of our commercial, technical, and efficiency innovations to date."   

Fortune was recently recognized as a finalist for the 2011 Energy Awards by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal for re-using construction materials and recycling waste during the conversion of the existing facility to data center space. According to DPR Construction, approximately 96% of construction waste was diverted from landfill, meaning 1,137 tons of material were either recycled or re-used on site. The company also used regionally sourced and recycled content within construction materials.

About Fortune Data Centers

Fortune Data Centers (www.fortunedatacenters.com) builds, owns and operates highly efficient and cost-effective wholesale data centers. Fortune's San Jose and Portland facilities meet or exceed the toughest industry standards for data centers in all operational categories of availability, security, connectivity, and physical resilience. Fortune is a privately held company, founded in 2006.

SOURCE Fortune Data Centers