Global one-stop IT outsourcing provider HCL - headquartered near Delhi, India - has completed the acquisition of its first wholly-owned data center in the U.S. The purchase was part of a larger deal HCL had made with one of its clients, a Fortune 500 company whose name the outsourcer declined to disclose.

The Parsippany, N.J., facility is the third HCL owns but its clients can choose from more than 300 locations worldwide operated by nine data center providers the company has partnered with, said Anubhav Saxena, HCL's VP of Infrastructure Services. Its other two data centers are in India.

HCL's new Tier 3 facility has 35,000 square feet of data center space. It is capable of handling 150 watts per square foot of power delivered by two utility lines terminated in a dedicated substation. The data center has been heavily virtualized since changing hands.

"We virtualized - to a very large (extent) - the servers, the storage, the back-up infrastructure, the networking," Saxena said. As a result, "we drastically reduced the footprint of our existing client and now we've got free space" to serve other clients. The existing client is the facility's previous owner, headquartered in the region, and HCL is currently providing services to that client. The company plans to open the facility to other customers in September.

One of the location's main advantages, according to Saxena, is its equal distance from some of HCL's clients' offices around the U.S. and in Europe. "Because they're equally distant from (the) data center out there, they actually get an advantage of uniform end-to end response times."

The location's second big advantage is the amount of highly skilled data center professionals in the area.

"A lot of very important Tier 3 data centers are found on the East Coast," Saxena explained. "We will need advanced skill sets inside the data center and we believe that if we have a data center out there, we will be able to leverage the skill sets that are available in that region."

HCL provides a full set of IT infrastructure outsourcing services to Fortune 1000 companies around the world. It has points of presence in all major U.S. markets that are connected to the rest of the world through both a trans-Atlantic and a trans-Pacific submarine cables.

Among HCL's clients are the Reader's Digest, a popular U.S. consumer magazine, design and engineering software developer Autodesk and Dixons, the large European electronics retailer.