World's Largest High-Rise Data Center Opens In New York 60
CowboyRobot writes with this excerpt from Wall Street & Technology: "[Wednesday of this week], Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the opening [of] a 1 million square foot high-rise data center [in the] old Verizon switching building at 375 Pearl Street. Sabey Data Center Properties, the owner of the property, has named the data center Intergate.Manhattan and says the building's location, power supply and connectivity to underground fiber make it an ideal location for a data center in New York City. ... Intergate.Manhattan has only one tenant so far, the New York Genome Center, a compute and storage platform for 12 leading medical institutions to tackle the big data challenges that will bring the benefits of genomics to patient care." Let's hope they keep plenty of fuel around for next storm season.
Re:How can they compete with other data centers th (Score:5, Insightful)
Although an excellent question, this has always been counter-intuitive about Manhattan.
Technically its a worthless piece of land and yet everyone flocks here and keeps pimping up the prices.
This Datacenter would not be going out of business anytime soon, and neither properties that charge $200/sq. ft. The reason is quite simple - proximity to other tech companies makes it a favorable location, and if you don't have to travel through Lincoln or Holland tunnel, then you don't have to waste an hour in traffic. As a CTO/ IT Manager you will likely chose a location that is within minutes of your office or place of residence. Time savings for you will translate into customers offsetting this cost for a faster service and bragging rights. Who wants to see 'our datacenter is in New Jersey'?
Re:How can they compete with other data centers th (Score:4, Insightful)
You might be imagining that location is irrelevant for datacenters. I mean, your computer is on the same Internet, right? Who cares where they're physically located?
Well, for one thing, there's the issue of latency. If you're working in NYC (as many businesses are), then you'll get lower latency going to a server in NYC than a server halfway around the world. This is especially important in the world of high-frequency trading, but it can also be a big deal for businesses that are operating in the cloud (instead of having local servers).
Second, there's the issue of physical access. If you're colocating servers in a datacenter, you might still want to get physical access to them at some point, and you'll want it to be easy to get to.
Then, for the datacenters, there's an issue of having access to resources. NYC has tremendous infrastructure, which can help all kinds of businesses operate more efficiently. But these resources aren't just about getting access to fast internet and reliable power, but also about things like staffing, business contacts, etc. If you build your datacenter in the middle of nowhere, then your talent pool-- whether you're talking about techs or management or executives-- is restricted to those willing to live out in the middle of nowhere. Though I've never run a datacenter on this scale, I can tell you that one of the hardest parts of running IT projects is finding competent and reliable staff, including finding good managers and executives.