Data services provider opens third valley location in North Las Vegas

ViaWest, a large data center, cloud computing and managed services provider, recently opened its third location in the Las Vegas Valley on East Lone Mountain Road in North Las Vegas. The official opening was scheduled for Feb. 28, but the provider soft-launched earlier in February.

The company announced the new facility last year and was heralded by North Las Vegas in its annual report and by North Las Vegas Mayor Shari Buck in her January State of the City address. Cage and cabinet customers have moved into the data center.

ViaWest opened its other facilities in downtown Las Vegas in 2001 and 2008, but due to security, all the sites are unmarked. Both the Las Vegas data centers are full, so it was time to expand the market, said Michael Vignato, ViaWest regional vice president and general manager for Nevada and Southern California.

“It was about finding the right size, finding the right location and a great city to work with,” he said.

Nevada’s low humidity makes it appealing for data centers such as
ViaWest that use evaporation as a cooling technique. ViaWest can use evaporative cooling 7,400 hours a year — or 85 percent of the time — in the Las Vegas Valley, according to the company. The servers are kept at 72 degrees year- round. Plus, Las Vegas has a low natural-disaster risk.

The facility earned the Uptime Institute’s Tier IV design certification, the highest rating possible, in October. The rating measures quality and reliability and found the new facility to be fault-
tolerant and durable against events such as fires and water leaks.

“I can’t stress enough how hard it is to get a Tier IV design. It’s not easy,” Vignato said. “You’ve got to do it right, so we’re really proud of it.”

Facility manager Paul Escobedo said this location is one of five Tier IV facilities in the country and that the company emphasizes security, reliability and cooling. He said he cannot predict how many clients it will house in the new facility because it varies on the amount of space each client requires.

The 110,000-square-foot facility will also be Energy Star- and Green Globe-certified, according to ViaWest.

Vignato said the company shopped around looking for the best building in the valley to house its third facility and settled in North Las Vegas because the location was right and the city was business-friendly.

He said the data centers in Nevada tend to be less expensive than Southern California, providing a higher return on investment for customers. He said that before Sept. 11, most data center providers kept a center on one coast and a redundant center on the opposite coast. However, when air travel was restricted, he said the data center customers changed their needs — they want to be a single day’s drive away. Vignato added that Las Vegas has an advantage over other regional cities such as Phoenix because Las Vegas has the hotel industry to support business clients.

He said clients come from across the country, and when the data center is fully built, the new facility will generate 25 to 30 additional jobs. In the first year, it plans to generate 13 jobs.

But data centers have a ripple effect in the job market, he said. Database administrators are among the secondary jobs that typically pop up when a new data center is built, Vignato said. ViaWest plans to build out an additional 40,000 square feet in the next three years, he said.

“An older data center that can’t handle this level of power uses more power in their air conditioning and have a bigger footprint,” Vignato said.