Our Story

In August 2008, the Company’s founders began to envision that a state-of-the-art data center could be realized by repurposing a building they had owned and lay dormant since late 2006. The building, located on Spring Park Road in Jacksonville, was originally constructed as a hardened operations center for a former regional bank, Barnett Banks. Doug Recker, a seasoned telecom and data center veteran, enlisted the help of a small team of industry experts and began to orchestrate the physical and network infrastructure build-out effort of the facility.

Work commenced in the fall of 2008 to upgrade the Spring Park Facility top to bottom as a first class data center. While much of the physical infrastructure was solid and of high quality, major overhauls and upgrades to the building security, fire suppression system, diesel generator platform, electrical power and switchgear, and air conditioning were undertaken. Moreover, extensive investment in the facility’s fiber network infrastructure was required in order to support high capacity bandwidth for customers reliability.

In early 2009, the work continued with the final infrastructure upgrades and network and security improvements. Building redundancy and quality into the core network switching and monitoring became a priority as work progressed. Colo5 officially opened its doors for business in March 2009 providing businesses in Northeast Florida with a fully-redundant, offsite backup location.

Colo5’s Vision is to be the leading provider of data center and disaster recovery services throughout the Southeast. “We will earn our customers’ commitment through continuous improvement driven by the passion, integrity, and innovation from every member of the Colo5 team.” Doug Recker, Founder/CEO