U.S. company Serverfarm, owned by Israeli real estate scion Avner Papouchado, has officially entered the data storage business with a 50-50 joint venture to develop data centers.
The Israel Infrastructure Fund called SFRDC aims to create more data center facilities and serve more clients not just in the United States. To date, the company has five data centers in the U.S., one in Canada, and one in Europe.
It plans to add more data centers in the North American region, and erect two more in Israel. Papouchado claims this new business venture is still in the works, and data centers are still in the developing stage.
The first two centers developed with a joint venture costs roughly 800 million shekels or $250 million, each with 12,000-square-meter. It would take around 20 months to build the data centers.
Papouchado claims that even though the data storage market these days is crowded, not a lot of companies can get into fruition in the long run. In fact, the Shonfeld Data Services Center facility is one of the few startups that hasn’t take off, even with Microsoft as a client.
Technology giants have their own data center standards, just as some companies have their own set of metrics for building one. Microsoft, for instance, aims to launch its cloud server farm in Israeli this 2021.
“Building a data center is like building a warehouse, and we’ve already learned a lot. Data centers are about efficiency and nuance. I find that it resembles aviation a lot,” said Papouchado.
Pandemic-Proof Model
Despite the threat of the pandemic, Serverfarm has created a unique business model to limit losses. It has acquired overhead belonging to beleaguered organizations and then converts the former owners into customers and make their own IT managers.
To simply put, excess capacity in the data center is leased out to other tenants. All acquired facilities were built to ‘sustain 30MW of capacity’ and owners only utilize around 5MW. The company has built a new capacity for these existing complexes.
“We can create capacity in very tight markets, very, very quickly. By definition, we’ve created 40MW in Toronto without the need to build a new building,” said Senior Vice President for global marketing and sales Arun Shenoy.
Serverfarm doesn’t pay for additional emissions, therefore clients don’t have to do so too. The company has produced more documentation to create virtual techniques for using seat-of-the-pants in assistance for partners and vendors.
