RagingWire Opens First VA Facility Within 1 MSF Campus

By Tudor Scolca

RagingWire’s VA3 in Ashburn

RagingWire has opened the first of seven planned data centers at its 78-acre campus in Ashburn, Va., and the company’s third in the region. Northern Virginia is currently the largest data center market in the world by net absorption values, with 115 megawatts delivered by the end of 2017, according to JLL’s 2018 Data Center Outlook. It is estimated that about 70 percent of all Internet traffic passes through this area.

NTT Communications acquired an 80 percent equity stake in RagingWire back in 2014, while early last year, it bought the rest of the shares. NTT and RagingWire invested 160 million in the newly opened Ashburn VA3. It will be interconnected to the company’s two other facilities, creating a footprint of more than 500,000 square feet and 44.4 megawatts of power.

The VA3 data center is a 245,000-square-foot facility with 16 megawatts of critical power immediately available. The hyperscale center has customizable two-megawatt and four-megawatt private suites, which in turn can be divided up according to need. A total of 112,000 square feet of raised floor comprises the interior of the facility.

Industry innovator

RagingWire was among the first to establish a foothold in the colocation industry. Founded in 2000, the company worked to develop enterprise solutions for businesses with increasing IT demands. RagingWire developed colocation facilities, where multiple tenants could have dedicated and secured deployments under the same roof. The model became an industry standard since then.

The company uses a patented electrical infrastructure which offers 2N+2 redundancy, above what is found in a standard Tier III facility. The same technology is used at Ashburn VA3, along with several other redundancy configurations. RagingWire works with Dominion Virginia Power in delivering cost effective electricity through two separate feeds.

Construction work is underway at VA4, the next data center in line to be opened within the one million-square-foot campus. Pre-leasing is available for 16 megawatts of critical power and about 200,000 square feet of data center space. VA4 is slated for completion in 2019.

Image courtesy of RagingWire