Cervalis, an information technology services company based in Shelton, Conn., has signed a 168,000-square-foot lease for a build-to-suit, Class A office space in Norwalk, Conn., according to the tenant’s broker, Jones Lang LaSalle.
The deal, the largest in Fairfield County this year to date, is for a “data and disaster recovery center” at 10 Norden Place, which will be constructed “as soon as possible,” according to JLL’s John Stoddard, who brokered the lease on behalf of Cervalis with Howard Greenberg of Howard Properties.
The center should be up and running in the first half of 2013, Stoddard said, adding that the transcation marks the largest build-to-suit office space in the county in the last 12 years.
The lease is “very long term, over 20 years,” according to one source, though neither Greenberg nor Stoddard would release any details on the lease.
The new center is an expansion for Cervalis, whose success in the growing data center industry is evident by its nearly half million square feet of space leased since its inception in 2000, Greenberg told The Real Deal.
Bruce Mosler, George Giannopoulos and Jodie Dostal of Cushman & Wakefield represented the landlord, FPG Norden DC, which is a subsidiary of Fortis Property Group, a Brooklyn-based real estate developer and operator. Mosler is the Chairman of Global Brokerage at Cushman.
Disaster recovery centers are becoming “more and more popular,” among data tenants, according to Stoddard. The idea, he said, is to be able to keep data available and servers up and running in the event of an emergency.
“Let’s say, in a worst case scenario, a tidal wave hits New York City,” he said. In that scenario, Cervalis employees could travel to the Norwalk space and “continue to operate their business,” he explained. “Everything is set up and ready to go.”
He added that Cervalis, which operates 470,000 square feet of data centers in the tri-state area, is the most conservative data services firm in the nation in terms of prepping for possible natural disasters.