Data center developer Pelio and Associates is building a new colocation facility in the Silicon Valley that will house containerized data centers. The site is an empty shell at the moment and the developer is in discussions with multiple prospective clients that have the choice between bringing in their own containers and going through Pelio to get modular units from existing vendors.

This is going to be Pelio's tenth data center, but the first one built to accommodate containers, said Leslie Pelio, a partner in the company and its founder. By trying this approach, the developer is expecting to gain on efficiencies associated with modular expansion of data center space.

"It really revolves around the efficiencies that you find in containers," Pelio said. In addition to energy efficiency, containers allow for "strategic deployment of capital. We don't have to go and build the entire facility at day one." Containers can also be deployed quicker than traditional data center capacity.

The building shell in Santa Clara, California, is 24,000 sq ft and Pelio is able to bring up to 18MW of power to the site total, although the infrastructure will be deployed incrementally, as requirements grow. The company will also provide cooling (evaporative) and network connectivity.

Currently, space in the facility is not limited to customers with large power requirements. The company plans to offer colo deals as small as one caged rack within a container.

Pelio plans to have three containers deployed at the site by the end of the year and to provide electrical and mechanical connectivity in early January. Redwood City Electric is doing electrical work at the site and Therma Mechanical is building the mechanical system.

The project is a step away from the norm for Pelio, which has built nine other data centers in the Silicon Valley, including four Digital Realty Trust facilities. In addition to being different in the way capacity is scaled, it may be handled differently by the developer, whose typical process has been building a facility, owning it for several years and then selling it off.

"I think that because this is a different design, we'd probably look at it a little bit differently" from an ownership perspective, Pelio said. The other partner in Pelio and Associates is Jon Shank.