Lots of pieces come together to make a data center happen, from the power company to the guys who provide the fiber. One of the biggest is the local government that has to approve the project and Prince William County, which has 2M SF of data center space, has spent the last decade fast-tracking its process to one month approval time rather than a year in some counties, says Prince William business development manager Jim Gahres, who spoke on our Successful Data Centers: Start to Finish panel. Prince William also introduced an annual permit that pre-qualifies engineers and architects working on a data center build-out, so that the process can continue to move quickly once a tenant comes in.

Prince William and other Virginia counties have worked closely with Dominion Power to make sure sites are properly chosen, says Dominion customer solutions director Phil Sandino. Clients need to make sure elected officials and stakeholders understand the infrastructure needed for a certain megawatt distribution. Phil says Dominion is one of the few utilities that provides power to the CIA, the Pentagon and the Norfolk Naval Station, so there’s no tolerance for power outages. The company is spending $10B to harden its power system until 2020. COPT data center solutions business development director Mark Gilbert moderated the panel.

Construction is also speeding up, says HITT Contracting tech sector VP Ross Rebraca. The majority of HITT’s projects are in Ashburn, and clients are requesting data center shells and then build-outs as needed. The shells take about six months, with the client providing its own technical equipment. However, he’d like to see the construction team be brought in sooner so that sites can be evaluated for environmental issues or bad soils. It also helps to keep the project on schedule, considering the client has made promises for tenant move-ins.

Another data center trend is dark fiber. More data center providers and enterprise customers are requesting this type of fiber optic cable for their networks, says SummitIG account director Gary James. He says firms want to manage over their own core infrastructure to gain access to the cloud. It’s not only essential to their business, but to their customers’ ability to connect to them and to support their fulfillment centers. The demand has extended from one strand of dark fiber to bundles of dark fiber.