Data center provider Server Farm Realty has completed construction of a new Silicon Valley data center. The 26,900-sq-ft facility in Santa Clara, California, brings 13,000 sq ft of data center space to the region's market.

SFR president and CEO Avner Papouchado said in a statement the company placed a lot of emphasis on prepping the facility to live through a natural disaster. Sitting on a meeting line of two tectonic plates, Silicon Valley and the surrounding region are in a seismically active zone.

"As we've seen with recent world events, disaster preparedness and the ability to remain operational are of the utmost importance," Papouchado said.

"From building redundant water supplies with a backup tank to outfitting the building's infrastructure to meet a seismic 1.5 importance factor, every design detail safeguards our customers' data in an earthquake-prone region."

The 1.5 seismic importance factor is a requirement for hospitals and emergency-services buildings.

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The building is reinforced with 22-ft drill piers on columns. It has lateral crossbeams, more beams o the roof, as well as joist and bracing hardware.

The infrastructure is a mix of Tier III and Tier IV components, designed to N+1 redundancy. There are three electrical line-ups, each housed in its own room.

Each line-up has two UPS units and a backup generator. There are also three medium-voltage switchgear rooms.

See our video interview with SFR's VP of data center operations Bob Glavan about the company's new facility in Santa Clara

SFR says the facility can run 24 hours without utility power. This was achieved through installing enlarged fuel tanks and signing multiple-priority refueling contracts with numerous fuel suppliers.

There are two water sources ÔÇô potable and recycled. In case outside water is cut off, a 12,500-gallon backup water tank will keep the data center going for 24 hours.

The company is going through the process of submitting the project for a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver certification from the US Green Building Council.

Its energy-efficiency features include a cooling system that can use free outside-air cooling 80% of the year, supplemented by evaporative-cooling units.

SFR is a fairly young subsidiary of the global hotel developer Red Sea Group. The subsidiary was announced late in 2010, and Santa Clara is the second data center it has brought online so far.

The first one was called Titan ÔÇô a 136,000-sq-ft repurposed former missile-control center of the US military in Moses Lake, Washington. The North American Aerospace Defense Command used it during the Cold War.

SFR is also in the process of outfitting a five-story data center in Chicago that will be focused on serving the electronic-trading industry.