Launched in 1995 as a Dayton-area Internet services provider, Donet expects a four-fold increase in its cloud-hosting infrastructure over the next five years, Mezera said. The company plans to grow from its current 15 employees to 40 by 2016, he said.
“We need to have a facility that can support that growth and where we were it was not possible,” Mezera said last week during a tour by the Dayton Daily News of the company’s new 12,000-square-foot headquarters at 130 W. Second Street.
On Monday, Donet opens its newly renovated facility, which is twice the size of the West First Street location where it spent the last 10 years. The company will change its name to DataYard, effective Thursday.
In addition to cloud hosting, Donet provides Internet access and the co-location of clients’ IT equipment in its data center. About 75 percent of its business is located in Dayton and the Miami Valley, Mezera said.
The DataYard name and logo liken the company’s newly expanded 5,000-square-foot data center to a “virtual” railroad yard, where information is securely and reliably exchanged with other networks around the clock, Mezera said.
The new facility, designed by Dayton-based Moda4 Design, evokes the rail yard theme with such elements as concrete, steel and railroad tie-like wooden beams. A “floating” conference room called the Boxcar is suspended 12 inches above the floor and features a translucent glass wall with digitally projected images that are visible from the street below.
Sparkbox of Dayton developed the DataYard branding. Ferguson Construction Co. of Sidney renovated the new space.
Mezera and company co-founder Leigh Sandy, who serves as vice president, financed the nearly $2 million project with private funds and a PNC bank loan. Donet did not request any public funding to remain downtown, Mezera said.
“Dayton needs help; it doesn’t need people drawing money out of it,” he said.
Mezera, 49, and Sandy, 45, are both Dayton-area natives and U.S. Air Force veterans. They met while pursuing graduate degrees in computer engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Donet officials looked at locations throughout the region and their commitment to downtown is “fabulous news” for the city, said Sandy Gudorf, president of the Downtown Dayton Partnership.
“These are high-tech jobs, they plan to grow and we couldn’t be more excited about it,” Gudorf said.
Donet has an 11-year lease on the new space. Mezera declined to discuss the privately held company’s revenues.
Donet remained downtown in part because electric power there is “reliable as a rock,” with utility power fed from two DP&L substations, Mezera said. Few downtown businesses lost power in the wake of major storm events such as Hurricane Ike that blacked out much of the region for days, he said.
“It’s the perfect place for a data center,” Mezera said.
The company’s previous location, a former IBM data center built during the 1980s, lacked the power and cooling capabilities needed for modern IT equipment, according to Mezera.
Mezara and his team intentionally oversized the new facility’s data center to allow for future growth. The center includes multiple upstream connection points to the Internet from three carriers, as well as redundant power, cooling and battery systems.
“We can double our size right now with the infrastructure we’ve got in place before we have to add any more equipment,” Mezera said. The company could then quadruple its size over time by incrementally adding on additional capacity, he said.
The mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems are isolated outside the data center for security purposes. Maintenance workers can access those systems without being in proximity to IT equipment that might be hosting critical data for a business, Mezera said.
Private cage space also is available to isolate a business’ equipment for “an enhanced layer of security beyond what is already present,” he said.
Customers can manage their own hardware in the data center or host their applications and data in Donet’s cloud infrastructure, where it can be monitored and managed with the company’s security and redundant support systems.
“The whole point of this investment is to make technology easier for business people to use,” Mezera said.
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