Pennsylvania-based managed data center services provider Steel Orca Inc. is filing for bankruptcy after failing in an attempt to transform a defunct steel mill on the state border with New Jersey into a new data center, reports say.

Steel Orca, which also has a data center facility in Princeton, New Jersey, voluntarily filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in early December, according to documents posted online and seen by Data Center Knowledge. The Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing means that all of the company’s assets will be transferred to a trustee prior to distribution among its creditors.

Bankruptcy attorney Bunce Atkinson of the New Jersey-based Atkinson & DeBartolo firm has been appointed as the trustee in Steel Orca’s case, although officials at the firm refused to comment on this.

Steel Orca’s bankruptcy comes despite the company making several interesting moves in the last year. Most recently, Steel Orca announced a strategic partnership with Avaya Inc. that aimed to build “next-generation software-defined data center”, using fabric-based SDN architectures.

Steel ORCA CTO Larry Hess also made an appearance on theCUBE during the IBM Edge2015 event last May, where he told us the company was experiencing “high demand” for the Linux and Oracle as-a-service solutions it provided.

Data Center Knowledge said that Steel Orca had big plans for its envisaged facility in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The old steel mill encompasses some 300,000 square feet, and the facility would have been fueled by a variety of local, renewable energy sources, with water from the Delaware River being earmarked for use in the cooling system.

However, the project was later delayed, before being canceled entirely for unexplained reasons. Somewhat mysteriously, another company called Keystone NAP LLC, which Data Center Knowledge claims has “links” to Steel Orca through its president John Parker, is now building its own data center on the old steel mill site.

Keystone’s CEO Peter Ritz recently told the Philadelphia Business Journal that Steel Orca’s plans for the site “fell through”, and that led to the foundation of Keystone, which took over the project.

Image credit: geralt via pixabay.com