Cyrus one sells out!

[JPC-Greg]

*CyrusOne Announces Acquisition by ABRY Partners*

HOUSTON, Texas – July 11, 2007 -- CyrusOne announced today that it has been acquired by ABRY Partners, a media and communications focused, Boston-based private equity firm. Since 2001, CyrusOne has built a strong presence in the high availability colocation and managed data center services marketplace. Over the past four years, the company has achieved strong top line and bottom line growth with a prominent niche in the energy, financial services, and healthcare marketplaces. With the completion of this transaction, CyrusOne seeks to accelerate its expansion. CyrusOne’s existing management team will continue their leadership of the company.

“We are strong believers and excited to be participating in the colocation and data center services industry through our investment in CyrusOne, and we are delighted to have the opportunity to partner with CyrusOne’s talented management team.” said C.J. Brucato III, principal of ABRY Partners. “CyrusOne has a leading market position and a strong and diversified blue chip customer base with a global footprint that we feel can greatly benefit from this new partnership.”

“The completion of this acquisition represents a significant step for CyrusOne to accelerate our growth and give the company significant strategic options to aggressively grow the business,” said David Ferdman, CEO, CyrusOne. “We are excited about the value that ABRY brings to our team and anticipate the tremendous opportunity this transaction creates for both existing and new customers.”

“There is a huge demand for managed services, particularly those offered in high availability, high density data center facilities," said Dan Golding, Vice President and Research Director, Tier 1 Research. "Those firms with the foresight to offer cutting edge technology services in an outsourced data center environment are extremely attractive to customers and have the upper hand in today's business environment."

Signal Hill Capital Group LLC initiated and advised CyrusOne in this transaction

*About CyrusOne*
CyrusOne is a leader in high availability, high density data center services, providing managed hosting, colocation and managed IT services. We help businesses optimize returns on technology investment while ensuring application availability, data security and superior IT performance. More information is available at www.cyrusone.com

*About ABRY Partners*

Based in Boston, Massachusetts, ABRY Partners enjoys a position as one of the most experienced and successful media and communications focused private equity investment firms in North America. Since 1989, ABRY has completed over $18 billion of leveraged transactions and other private equity and mezzanine investments, representing investments in more than 450 media and communications properties. Extensive and long-standing relationships with many different stakeholders in the media, communications and finance businesses allow ABRY to contribute significant value to operating partners and portfolio companies. More information is available at www.abry.com .

[Ron]

It's good to know that Houston will now be hosting Muzak servers. Maybe they'll upgrade the connections.

BTW, has ns5 been duplicated in Atlanta yet?

[JPC-Les]

My mistake, ns5 is not yet duplicated in Atlanta. We'll look at getting that done.

[Ron]

Woo hoo!

[mattsiegman]

I must have missed something here :-/

[Doug Nelson]

Are they a competitor? New overlords? This is good news? Bad news?

[JPC-Greg]

Theyre one of the datacenters we have colo with , no big deal really.

[Vin DSL]

Interesting company, that CyrusOne...

According to what I was able to garner... CyrusOne decided blade routers were the way of the future, looked around for a 'hot spot' on the backbone of the web, and settled on Houston.

Houston evidently contains light-swords for 14 major carriers, hence bandwidth costs are dirt cheap, but the area is subject to flooding, so CyrusOne chose a spot in Houston, above the floodplain, to house these blades. They also built a second facility in Houston, in case CyrusOne #1 goes underwater, and yet another in Dallas, out of harm's way.

'The problem', if you will, is... while they judged correctly on the locations, they misjudged the popularity of blade servers, and now need to invest $40m-$50m in their facilities in order to expand - both the size of the facilities and the electrical services.

Blade servers require LOTS of A/C. If they get above 80 F, they'll die. Consequently, CyrusOne spends more on electricity ($20k-$30k/mo) than bandwidth. LoL!

Anyway, I guess they needed mo' money to dump into the business (hopefully not up their noses aka Scareface)!

Supposedly CyrusOne management stays in place, so... no big deal, like Jag said... probably...

[JPC-Greg]

Thats the spin version, the real version is...

They started right before the dot bomb trying to put dc's in several cities, san antonio was the first , houston, few others. All but houston failed basically and years of learning, crazy whiteboard drawings, and lots of money later they are where they are. Ive never seen so many whiteboard drawings in all my life.

Their corp clients are all about server density which is where the rest of that story comes into play. Id be lying if I said the dc first was cool as it used to be. Its getting warm in there but its their own doing.

My ideas of a datacenter design are quite different. When we build ours, and Im sure we will soon as we find a good site, its going to be unlike any before it. One big green machine, Green is the future.

[Vin DSL]

Ive never seen so many whiteboard drawings in all my life...

When we build ours, and Im sure we will soon as we find a good site, its going to be unlike any before it. One big green machine, Green is the future.

Project Spearmint perhaps?

[Ron]

Giant swimming pool on the roof for cooling and to be used for exercise by employees...? you'd have to build in a northern clime, no?

How else can a data center be green? Treadmills for the techs to generate a few watts?

[JPC-Greg]

lmao, tredmill and tech dont belong in the same sentence. Have you seen the average modern IT geek ? If you find a way to convert mass in energy easily we'll be golden.

[mattsiegman]

They did (Nuclear plants kind of work on that principal.)

[Ron]

Actually, when you give such great mass some velocity, like when the boss walks in the room, tremendous amounts of energy are available. If I recall my physics, E=1/2 * M * V^2

So Energy is equal to 1/2 of Les times the speed of the jump squared. That's 42.

Of course it follows that Energy falls off as a square of the distance, so as you leave the room, things slow down. Conservation of Mass prevents any work from being accomplished because if it were, then energy would go through the roof.

Or not.

[Gwaihir]

So.. those geeks all work for you, or do you want to attract geeky clientele too?

If the latter, I propose lots of gadgets like laptop bags and such that read:

42
JaguarPC.com

Of course, I'll be happy to review any prototypes for you, you have my home address .