After year of growth, Baltimore Technology Park eyes more expansion
BYLINE: Karen Buckelew
As it celebrates its one-year anniversary, the Baltimore Technology Park is finding its growth needs already have outstripped a previously announced $3 million expansion plan.
The park is a data center, a high-tech warehouse for companies to securely store their data and hardware, including servers. By June it will have enough space to add as many as 250 clients to its current 12.
The facility is adding 4,000 square feet to the 11,000-square-foot expansion officials announced last October, said President Jim Weller. The project now will cost $4 million.
When the expansion is finished, the facility, located off Russell Street in Southwest Baltimore, will measure 45,000 square feet.
Demand for its services is high, Weller explained of the growth.
"Without the expansion," Weller said, "I think we've missed the opportunity of larger clients. "
The company is in talks with several new clients, but will not finalize details until further along in the expansion project, Weller said.
The facility, a project of Alabanza Corp., a Baltimore-based Web hosting company, set up shop near the city's sports stadiums in March 2006.
Data centers are relatively rare in Maryland, said both Weller and Mark Powell, CEO of Sidus Group, a Crofton-based firm that provides data center services at its Annapolis facility.
There is a high concentration of such operations in Northern Virginia along the Dulles corridor, said both men. Powell said the area is better outfitted with the fiber networks required for such services, and a high number of government contractors requiring high security.
More companies are seeking data center services in an attempt to reach their client base on the Web, both executives agreed.
"More and more companies are moving more of their applications on the Web to make them accessible" to customers, said Powell, whose company serves about 650 clients annually.
Most firms, though, find it too costly to install in their own offices the technology, security and redundant power that would make a fast-moving, highly trafficked, highly reliable Web site possible.
The Baltimore Technology Park offers clients the rental of cabinets - essentially cages equipped with power supplies and Internet connectivity - for about $900 per month.
The growth plan will add 250 cabinets to the current 55. Some clients require only one cabinet; larger clients can fill more than 100 cabinets, Weller said.
Clients use the cabinets to store their primary equipment - servers, hard drives, huge quantities of data - or back-up versions of primary gear stored elsewhere.
The data center offers the promise of a constant power supply backed up in several ways, including batteries and a diesel-powered generator.
The technology center also offers clients 24-hour security and the availability of network supervisors, basically trained professionals capable of handling technological problems should the companies require such assistance.
Sidus Group, which employs 15, offers Web hosting services in addition to equipment and data storage. It also will lease clients space on its own servers, meaning they do not need to invest in hardware of their own, Powell said.
The Baltimore Technology Park is adding two additional full-time employees to the current three, said Weller, as well as office and conference space for the network supervisors to move their operations to the data center. At the moment, they work out of Alabanza's offices about one mile away on East Baltimore Street.
It is the only such facility in Maryland to allow its customers to use any Web hosting or Internet service provider they choose; they do not have to use Alabanza's services, he added.
Dan Blake, CEO of St. Petersburg, Fla.-based CourseMax, which sells software online, said his company has used the Baltimore Technology Park since November. It moved its data from a Northern Virginia facility last fall when it outgrew the power and space that that data center had available, Blake said.
CourseMax is looking forward to growing with the technology facility that Blake added.
"Our cabinet is filled to the brim," Blake said. "We're definitely expanding. "