An Indianapolis company that operates Tier-4 data centers is expanding its business to Fort Wayne with the purchase of the former Target store on the south side of Fort Wayne.
LiveWire Fort Wayne LLC is the name of the entity created to purchase the 110,000 square foot building, which has been vacant for several years. The owners of the business, which operates in Indianapolis as Lifeline Data Centers, are Alex and Dana Carroll and Richard Banta.
Mike Dahm, of NAI Bradley, represented the buyers in the transaction, which includes 10 acres of land. Brad Sturges, of CBRE/Sturges, represented the seller.
Tier-4 data centers are essentially wholesale co-location facilities for companies that require data storage.
“It’s like a high-tech landlord,” Dahm said.
The owners of Lifeline started the business with a 10,000 square foot facility in downtown Indianapolis and then purchased the former Eastgate shopping center to add another 100,000 square feet of capacity.
The plans for the Fort Wayne data center were announced last March but the location had not been secured at that time.
The new owners plan extensive renovations to the Target store’s exterior, Dahm said. The data center will be filled with computers that store critical information for businesses, hospitals, government, universities and other institutions that need to safeguard their critical data in a secure facility.
“Although we won’t employ large numbers of people,” Alex Carroll said last March, “a Lifeline Data Centers will be a major drawing card for new businesses looking at northeast Indiana to locate – and for existing companies to expand or to increase their capacity for local and secure data storage.”
A Tier-4 data center is considered the most “robust” of data centers. It is designed to host mission-critical servers and computer systems, with fully redundant cooling, power, network links and storage subsystems and compartmentalized security zones controlled by biometric access controls.