WILMINGTON – A new company has acquired a downtown data center with the goal of meeting the needs of a growing number of clients in the region, especially those in the life sciences.
DāSTOR LLC was launched Sept. 15 by data center industry veteran Kevin Mulqueen, who is backed by a group of private investors. Pronounced “day-store” as a play on data storage, the company acquired four existing data centers in Wilmington, and King of Prussia and Reading, Pa.
Although the acquisition deals with IPR Secure and Databridge Sites weren’t disclosed, Mulqueen said that he and investors are putting tens of millions into the operation with the intent of capitalizing on the rapid expansion of digital storage and security needs.
Mulqueen knows data infrastructure. He’s the former president of colocation for Crown Castle, the nation’s largest third-party provider of communications infrastructure, and has nearly 30 years of experience in the sector. His investors lured him out of a short retirement after several acquisition opportunities popped up in the greater Philadelphia area – some at attractive prices due to the impact of the pandemic, he said.
“In the data center business, if you can’t get out to talk to customers, they can’t come see your facilities, and you don’t have a marketing team to be able to keep you in touch with your customers, you have a problem,” he said, noting that a sales staff would solve that problem for DāSTOR. “What we’re doing now is significantly different than the way the business was run 60 days ago, so we’re really excited about where we’re headed.”
The majority of DāSTOR’s roughly 20 employees work in Wilmington at the 1201 N. Market St. office that houses Delaware’s only Tier III data center, which means it has several levels of power and backup redundancy to ensure that systems and websites stay online. Those employees are split between facility maintenance and product support, with DāSTOR pitching its storage or backup solution software to customers outside of its data centers as well.
“We’re going to leverage off of what [former owner IPR Secure] has done in the health care and legal communities. Wilmington is a great spot, an underserved spot, for these products,” Mulqueen said.
DāSTOR expects to continue to grow fairly rapidly, adding two more facilities in the next 12 months, likely in the Midwest or on the West Coast, Mulqueen said.
Many companies are beginning to outsource their servers to data centers like DāSTOR in order to shed the costs and responsibilities for maintaining them, he said. DāSTOR offers colocation, or the storage, maintenance and operation of servers from many different clients in one place.
While DāSTOR acquired a number of clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses, Mulqueen said it could comfortably add hundreds, or conceivably thousands, of new ones with its current capacity.
“With colocation, its kind of like a game of Tetris,” he said, referring to configuring racks and stations for each client in a controlled environment space.
DāSTOR is also building out a site at Discovery Labs, a biotech hub campus at the former GSK headquarters in King of Prussia, to specifically serve life sciences companies by next year.
“We basically wanted to create an environment where they’re all working together in a facility. They all have similar security needs. They all have similar uptime needs. That building is perfect to be able to support that,” Mulqueen said.
