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Businesses IT

World's Largest High-Rise Data Center Opens In New York 60

Posted by timothy from the closer-to-the-sun-more-solar-power dept.
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.
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World's Largest High-Rise Data Center Opens In New York More

World's Largest High-Rise Data Center Opens In New York

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  • F7 is your friend editors! Are you even reading what you post any more?

  • When I started reading the sentence "Let's hope they keep plenty of fuel around..." I was not thinking it would end up being a reference to storms.

  • How can they compete with other data centers that (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Saturday March 23, 2013 @12:53PM (#43258049)

    How can they compete with other data centers that lower land costs and are not in NYC / Manhattan.

    Also what about cooling?

    Also the costs of trucking stuff into Manhattan is high in just tolls.

    • Re:How can they compete with other data centers th (Score:5, Insightful)

      by boulat ( 216724 ) on Saturday March 23, 2013 @01:03PM (#43258095)

      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'?

      • Since datacenters always pack a lot of value per sq-foot, they would be a cool way to to finance the tallest skyscraper.

        I've always wondered how cold it is at the top of the Empire State Building, Sears Tower, etc, but I figure it must be a lot colder than street level. That would make for better cooling than a regular building, all other things being equal.

        Furthermore, it would be a nice way to integrate data processing and communications, which are both vital for the data center. Instead of having separat

        • The top of the Empire State Building (excluding the spire) is 1250ft. With a standard lapse rate of 3.5 degrees F/1000ft, that is only about 4.4 degrees F difference. There may also be other environmental conditions that affect the temperature differential, like the high amount of retained energy by smaller buildings at ground level. I personally don't know if a few degrees difference in ambient temperature changes much as far as cooling costs.

          • The top of the Empire State Building (excluding the spire) is 1250ft. With a standard lapse rate of 3.5 degrees F/1000ft, that is only about 4.4 degrees F difference.

            Depending on location, buildings do weird things temp wise. The building next my work was only 6 stories tall, but for some weird reason cold wind would funnel down the side and make the north side of my building parking lot really frigid. the trees in that area were permanently bent in th ewind. plus in an enclosed area, heat is contained and rises. It ends up being pretty complex. sometimes lower will be warmer.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dbIII ( 701233 )
              Typically close to half the wind that hits the building flows directly down to street level if it hits the side of the building square on. That's one reason for awnings. Civil engineers used to do things like put building models in big tubs full of flowing water and squirt dye in to see where the wind would go - very cool to watch and sometimes a bit different to what a computer model will tell you (turbulent flow is a bastard to model).

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Above ( 100351 )

      Latency.

      High frequency trading firms will pay big bucks to be closer to the exchanges as they can't (yet) cheat the speed of light. If being closer makes an extra billion a year, the cost of the data center space is not relevant.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by afgam28 ( 48611 )

        That's what I thought too. So I was surprised to read this:

        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.

        Not sure how these guys are going to benefit from the low latency that comes with being physically close to Wall St.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by plopez ( 54068 )

          Many major research centers work with other institutes all across the globe. Being on the same networks as Wall Street you would have lots of band width to shuffle huge amounts data to England, France, Japan, etc.

    • Second time around, better results?
      This was originally the Verizon Building. In 2007 Taconic [taconicinvestments.com] purchased this building for resale. You might remember them from such deals as Google buys building for 2 billion [wired.com].
      Taconic walked away from 375 Pearl in 2008 as the logistics failed. Not sure how a commercial concept on this building is suddenly going to work for someone else.

    • 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.

      • But there middle of middle of nowhere and some out of the of downtown high-Rise area and for reliable staff paying hem $15/hr no benefits in NYNY is SHIT pay.

      • Wall Street thinks Jersey City is a better place to build data centers than Manhattan.

        As far as I know, JC didn't suffer massive infrastructure damage when Sandy came through either.

      • None of this post makes sense.

        1. We're not talking about halfway around the world. They could put the datacenter 20 miles away and pay a small fraction of the property and maintenance costs.
        2. Our primary datacenters are ~270 miles apart, and the latency is less than 10ms round trip. 20 miles is going to have negligible latency.
        3. Datacenters have a tiny staff on site for a large number of servers. You don't need a huge talent pool to get someone to rack servers and run cables.
        4. In the rare event that

    • could be going after DR for banks on wall street or HFT trading

    • How can they compete with other data centers that lower land costs and are not in NYC / Manhattan.

      Also what about cooling?

      Also the costs of trucking stuff into Manhattan is high in just tolls.

      And IT people without Big Gulp sodas!

  • Pics or it didn't happen

  • You're doing it wrong.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )

      You're doing it wrong.

      Maybe www.owncloud.org or similar self hosting projects.
      I'm not entirely sure if that's doing it right because I don't really know much about what people want in the "cloud". I haven't been following the dropbox thing much apart from laughing at spectacular security fuckups (eg. not being able to revoke sharing, being able to get other people's files from an utterly stupid dedup fuckup or even being able to login to other people's accounts without a password one night), and all I kno

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • They shouldn't advertise it. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Just makes it sound like a huge target for evil-doers and guys with dastardly mustaches.

    Out of curiousity, how do they back up the data at huge centers like this?

  • Scariest building in Manhattan (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's forty stories tall and has no windows; not a single one. I've always considered it the creepiest building in the city. I'm not surprised they put a data-center in it - what else are you going to do with a giant, windowless monolith?

  • Because that's all C.O.'s really are, glorified data centers.

  • I thought they meant 33 Thomas Street [wikipedia.org], which is another old switching building but has no windows, unlike the Verizon building they're talking about.

    Back in the day (as recent as the late 80s or even early 90s) a lot of downtown Manhattan businesses had multiple phone lines going to every desk at those office high rises. These buildings existed just to house all that equipment, from what I always gathered. While I don't know what it looks like inside today, I'd imagine the technology of today requires onl

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