Silicon Valley-based virtualization-technology giant VMware is expanding its data center in Wenatchee, Washington. After having announced launch of the initial two phases in October 2009, the company is now building out Phase III of the facility.

The decision to expand capacity at the Wenatchee facility ÔÇô the only purpose-built VMware data center ÔÇô came about 1.5 years ago, Drew Kramer, VP of IT technical operations at VMware, told DatacenterDynamics. "We have a third phase of the Wenatchee data center under construction right now," he said.

The company expects the third phase to provide it with enough data center capacity for the next 3-5 years. The plan is to bring the third hall online by August 2011.

Each phase provides about 5MW of power total and about 20,000 sq ft of data center space. Phase I is currently more than 90% full and Phase II is about 50% full.

The facility has enough room to accommodate five such phases. VMware leases the building from Washington-based data center developer Sabey, but the facility was designed and built for the customer.

The company also uses a number of colocation facilities, the two major ones being in Santa Clara, California, and Bangalore, India. VMware uses a Savvis data center in Santa Clara and a Tata facility in Bangalore.

The bulk of the company's corporate production equipment is in Santa Clara. Both Wenatchee and Bangalore facilities are used mostly for R&D purposes, but have some corporate IT gear.

VMware's own IT environment is about 97% virtualized, the company's CIO Mark Egan told DatacenterDynamics.

Learn more about the data center industry in Washington State and meet all the key players in the market at the DatacenterDynamics conference in Bellevue, Washington (near Seattle) on 17 May.