Skybox Datacenters™ has announced it has formed a strategic partnership with T5 Facilities Management (T5FM). Through this strategic partnership, Skybox will offer move-in ready wholesale data centers in mid-market locations operated by the same team that operates T5 Data Centers’™ national portfolio of wholesale data centers. Construction on the first data center initiative, Skybox Houston One, is expected to be completed in November and it will be commissioned in January 2015.

Skybox Datacenters recently broke ground on its Skybox Houston One facility, an 86,960-sq-ft purpose-built data center with four independent data halls; the first wholesale data center to serve the Houston Energy Corridor. The new Skybox Houston One facility offers dedicated data halls at 1.2 to 2.4 MW each with lower overall total cost of operations than retail data centers. Additionally, Skybox uniquely offers tenants the ability to procure and negotiate their own power contracts directly with the provider of their choice. Under the partnership agreement, Skybox will serve as landlord and T5FM will provide facilities support and operations management for Skybox Houston One.

“Skybox and T5 have very similar philosophies as to how to best serve data center customers, and through this partnership we can bring T5’s facilities management expertise to new customers in mid-market regions,” said Mike Casey, COO of T5. “The expertise and protocols that existing T5 customers rely on will adapt quite well to Skybox’s clientele.”

T5FM offers comprehensive on-site data center management; the same comprehensive facilities management that T5 uses in its data centers in Atlanta, Colorado, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, North Carolina, and Portland. T5FM will apply the same kind of best practices used in all of T5’s data centers, including policies and procedures to mitigate risk and eliminate operational concerns with an emphasis on safety, training, and communications.

“The strategic partnership between Skybox Datacenters and T5FM will bring the best data center management expertise available to our customers,” said Rob Morris, Managing Partner, Skybox Datacenters. “This partnership allows us to focus on our core development business while knowing that the T5FM team will keep operations running smoothly. It’s a great marriage.”

Using this wholesale data center business model, Skybox will lease self-contained data center halls to customers, each with its own dedicated mechanical and electrical infrastructure, so customers retain total operational control. An on-site T5FM team will provide infrastructure support. Skybox Houston One is specifically designed to cater to the needs of oil and gas, healthcare, and other large corporations in the region to meet their business-critical, high-performance, ultra low latency computing needs.