CoreSite Realty opened another data center building on its Reston, Virginia, campus last week. The second building, “VA2”, contains 198,000 sq ft of available space, with more than a quarter (50,000 sq ft) having already been leased to a single client, the company said in a release.

The flagship tenant signed its lease in the last quarter of 2014. Phase 2 of construction has already begun and will add an additional 50,000 sq ft, according to CoreSite, which anticipates completion in the second quarter of 2015.

VA2 has been LEED Gold certified, is PCI DSS compliant, and has received SSAE 16 SOC 1 Type 2 validation. As of August 2014, CoreSite completed SSAE 16 examinations at all 15 of its operational facilities in the US.

The new facility is also AWS Direct Connect-enabled, which allows occupants to connect directly to Amazon Web Services via a private network connection.

Reston campus
“We are pleased to open the first phase of VA2 fully leased to an anchor customer, consistent with our strategy for the facility,” said Tom Ray, CEO of CoreSite, in a statement. “Further, we believe that the nearly 60 network, cloud and IT service providers already deployed at our Reston campus combine with our market-leading network ecosystem…to enable CoreSite to offer one of the most comprehensive solutions in the region for performance-sensitive customer requirements.”

Northern Virginia remains a popular location for new facilities. Fellow data center provider CyrusOne purchased a large piece of property in Sterling, Virginia, and announced in February of last year that it would build its first East Coast data center on the site.

Other providers including Amazon have clustered at Loudoun near Ashburn, where an Amazon data center building site suffered a fire last week,while Amazon’s bid to expand data center building to nearby Prince William County is in the balance owing to protests about the powerlines this would require.

Telco giant Level 3 opened its newest facility at Herndon in August of last year. Mike Sapien, a principal analyst with Ovum Global Enterprise Services, said Northern Virginia is one of the top three data center markets in the world - according to analyst firm’s global data center tracking information.