Press release

Lincoln Rackhouse and Principal Real Estate Investors Acquire Bytegrid’s Three-Market Portfolio of Data Center Facilities, Services and Operations

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Lincoln
Rackhouse
, the data center division of Lincoln Property Company with
over 12 years of experience helping organizations of all sizes locate,
analyze and secure data center space for leasing or owning, announces
that it has closed on its acquisition of Bytegrid.
Bytegrid is a leading compliant IT Infrastructure company providing
colocation, managed services and hosting solutions.

The acquisition, in partnership with Principal Real Estate Investors,
includes all Bytegrid assets: three data centers in the Washington,
D.C., Chicago and Seattle markets and the entirety of the company’s
existing colocation, managed services, network and hosting business.
This deal expands the Lincoln Rackhouse portfolio by 320,000 square feet
and adds an additional 16MW of IT power load to achieve a total
portfolio that spans 2.5 million square feet and well over 100MW across
16 locations in 14 strategic markets. Lincoln Rackhouse primarily serves
as a real estate owner and property manager specializing in data
centers. The acquisition of Bytegrid represents Lincoln Rackhouse’s
first step into the data center and colocation operations sphere. The
deal closed on May 7, 2019.

“We’re excited to expand our existing relationship and successful track
record in the data center sector with Lincoln Rackhouse through this
acquisition,” states Ben Wobschall, Director of Acquisitions for
Principal Real Estate Investors. “Together with the team at Lincoln
Rackhouse, we’ve created a proven model of strategically acquiring
premium-quality data center assets and securing leases with cloud and
colocation operating partners.”

As part of the acquisition, Bytegrid’s solution portfolio will be
bifurcated, separating the company’s real estate assets from its service
portfolio of colocation, managed services and hosting solutions. This
will allow the acquired assets to be positioned for assignment to
operating partners within each market across the U.S. and ensures that
Lincoln Rackhouse doesn’t compete with customers across the rest of
their data center portfolio.

“Bytegrid’s existing business, recurring revenues and key market
presence make this an attractive opportunity for us,” adds Ryan
Sullivan, Managing Director at Lincoln Rackhouse. “While our non-compete
commitment to our current customers and operating partners remains, the
Bytegrid acquisition is indeed all-encompassing, including the
operational management and services business of three colocation sites.
We do look forward to integrating these facilities into our nationwide
portfolio and marketing those solutions to operators in the industry.
We’re excited to further explore the interest that has been shown in
these assets thus far now that we’ve closed the rather complex
acquisition.”

In addition to offering robust services, the three highly-secure data
centers joining the Lincoln Rackhouse portfolio possess industry-leading
physical security attributes as well as industry standards for HIPAA
compliance, SOC 2 Type II certification, EHNAC accreditation and more.
With this acquisition, Lincoln Rackhouse can immediately offer
availability to end users, cloud providers, managed and colocation
service operators in the Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Chicago markets.
Customers can also benefit from added space and power across these three
new markets, plus an expanded presence on the West Coast.

“We have been working hard over the past two years to augment our
platform and capabilities to better serve our clients across the U.S.,
adding several new end user and operator tenants to our roster and
amping up our facilities, property management and sales teams,” notes
Martin Peck, Executive Vice President of Lincoln Rackhouse. “This
acquisition further underscores our dedication to growth and delivery of
top-tier service, allowing us to leverage greater space and power to
seamlessly meet the needs of our clients.”

Lincoln Rackhouse will continue to acquire enterprise data center
facilities and anchor them with operating partners to accommodate the
enterprise shift in demand for data center space and further expand its
footprint.

To learn more about Lincoln Rackhouse, visit www.rackhouse.com.

About Lincoln Rackhouse

Lincoln Rackhouse, the data center division of Lincoln Property Company,
owns and operates one of the nation’s most rapidly growing data center
portfolios, managing over 2.5 million square feet of mission critical
space across 16 U.S. markets. Leveraging Lincoln Property Company’s
proven approach to successful data center facility management, Lincoln
Rackhouse delivers a full-service, mission critical real estate platform
and provides flexible data center solutions for the world’s top
organizations. Lincoln Rackhouse offers its clients unparalleled
industry knowledge, exceptional customer service anchored in honesty and
transparency, and an unbiased approach to fulfilling infrastructure
technology requirements. For more information, visit us at www.rackhouse.com
and follow us on LinkedIn
and Twitter.

About Principal Real Estate Investors

Principal Real Estate Investors manages or sub-advises $79.4 billion in
commercial real estate assets (as of March 31, 2019). The firm’s real
estate capabilities include both public and private equity and debt
investment alternatives. Principal Real Estate Investors is a dedicated
real estate group of Principal Global Investors, a diversified asset
management organization and a member of the Principal Financial Group®.