A Beltsville IT storage firm has snatched up a 300,000-square-foot building in Glen Burnie so it can compete with companies in Northern Virginia, where 95 percent of the regional industry is located.
The
AiNET CyberNAP facility will be the largest stand-alone data center in Maryland, Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., according to Darrell Tanno, AiNET's vice president of business development.
AiNET's paid $1.6 million for the Anne Arundel County building. The 19-year-old company has two other facilities in Maryland.
Founded by CEO Deepak Jain, a Howard County native, AiNET operates a secure, cloud storage service based on proprietary technology. Jain stated that CyberNAP already has commitments from several customers. The facility is located near Fort Meade and is geared to offer specialized security features.
Tanno expects that in the next five to seven years, when the Glen Burnie facility is operating at full capacity, it will have an “economic impact of upwards of $1 billion annually, much of it staying in Maryland.”
The Glen Burnie facility will house more than 10,000 equipment cabinets and support up to 1 million servers. The facility itself will employ about 20 people but Tanno says that the real job impact will be AiNET’s clients who, because of AiNET's increased capacity, can handle more contracts. New jobs would be primarily for skilled IT workers but support personnel would be needed as well, he says.
AiNET opened its first facility in 2003, a 50,000-square foot data center in Beltsville. The 20,000-square foot Laurel data center followed in 2008.
AiNET provides IT services to clients in the public and commercial/private sectors. Tanno says the current split is 60 percent public sector, 40 percent commercial/private sector. Public sector clients include universities and government. Virtually all of the government clients are through system integrators, he says.
Source: Darrell Tanno, AiNET
Writer: Barbara Pash