Edge Industry Review’s “Fireside Chat”: Raul Martynek on DataBank’s big investment in regional edge data centers
Edge Industry Review’s latest Fireside Chat interview talks about the data center market with a company that’s been making its mark outside of the traditional markets such as San Jose, California and Ashburn, Virginia. That company is DataBank.
The company has been executing a strategy to help enterprise and hyperscale customers by scaling its colocation and edge infrastructure footprint. In March, DataBank closed its acquisition of four existing Houston, Texas area data centers from CyrusOne for $670 million. That transaction means the company is serving over 30 metro markets from 60-plus data centers in DataBank’s U.S. portfolio.
EdgeIR interviewed Raul Martynek, DataBank’s CEO, about how Houston fits into the edge data center landscape. Martynek has been CEO since 2017; prior to joining the company, he has served as CEO and COO at several data center and telecom companies as well as served as senior advisor for investors such as Digital Bridge Holdings and Plainfield Asset Management.
Having been instrumental in M&A and organic growth strategies in the digital infrastructure space, EdgeIR wanted Martynek’s perspective on Databank’s overall strategy and how the company is positioned as a player in edge infrastructure.
“We think an edge data center can either be a traditional data center, like the ones that DataBank builds, and we also think it can be a modular data center, Martynek said. “Two years ago, we made an investment in a company called EdgePresence, which is a modular data center business,” he said, noting that DataBank has been working with the Jacksonville, Florida-based company over the last 18 months to identify “Specific use cases that I like to say are highly geographically specific.”
Among the topics covered in the interview:
- What enterprise customers are looking for in a data center provider, and how both regional edge data center services and access to hyperscale cloud providers plays into demand at DataBank.
- Sustainability initiatives at DataBank and how customers’ carbon footprint plans are impacting the firm as they look to leverage edge computing.
- The key trends that are going to drive business growth for the data center industry in 2022.
To that last point, DataBank is putting a lot of money down on its vision for edge data centers.
“We have almost a half a billion-dollar capital budget this year. And we are actively building over 141 megawatts of [powered] shell, in-place UPS and expansion capacity across 10 markets to support what we perceive is this kind of wave of edge demand that’s going to happen over the next couple of years,” according to Martynek.
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Article Topics
CyrusOne | Databank | DigitalBridge | EdgeIR Video Interviews | EdgePresence | investment | M&A | modular data center | regional edge data center
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