Slashdot Mirror
World's Largest High-Rise Data Center Opens In New York
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.
F7 is your friend editors! Are you even reading what you post any more?
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
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.
lucm, indeed.
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.
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'?
It's official, "New York SUCKS."
Backup power logistics. Especially in a big, corporate-managed skyscraper with lots of "normal" tenants who'd frown upon things like a diesel generator indoors, let alone a post-storm bucket brigade of diesel fuel in the stairwell.
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.
Shit happens whether it's storms or earthquakes. Storms just take power out, the data will be relatively safe. Earthquakes or volcano's (Iceland, Yellowstone, San Andreas fault line) will take out entire infrastructures and destruct data.
Besides that, ping times between east coast and west coast are anywhere between 100 and 400ms on a good day, that's a LOT of latency if everything was concentrated over there. Then there is also the issue of pipe sizes across the continent - it's far cheaper to get dedicated 1Gbps between New York City and say Buffalo, NY than between NYC and San Francisco.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
http://voices.yahoo.com/if-telecommute-outside-york-subject-8561125.html
Read 'em and WEEP!!
much more geologically ... stable
Which West Coast are you talking about? The one with all the earth quakes?
Pics or it didn't happen
You're doing it wrong.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
the owner [...] says the building's location [...] an ideal location [...]
What else would they say? Press release : The location is heavily overpriced and actually the worst location one could ever build a datacenter. Everything is so much more expensive and we never thought it trough.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
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?
Second time around, better results?
This was originally the Verizon Building. In 2007 Taconic purchased this building for resale. You might remember them from such deals as Google buys building for 2 billion.
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.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
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 separate communication towers, if the data center is built into a skyscraper then you'll already have plenty of height for your communication antennae.
Perhaps that data-center-skyscraper could also sport lots of solar panels to reduce its carbon footprint.
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.
Some data centers have to be near their users. It's called latency.
Its an ex telco exchange/central office I suspect that the DC is where the switches used to be and they took advantage of the preexisting kit in the building diverse power/ cable routing etc I would suspect that the gen sets are low down on the 1st or ground floors so that refueling shouldn't be a problem - or they have pumps with enough head that can pump fuel up from street level to the generators or have a crane on top and lift up barrels that way.
could be going after DR for banks on wall street or HFT trading
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
But there middle of middle of nowhere and some out of the of downtown high-Rise area and for reliable staff paying hem $15/hr no benefits in NYNY is SHIT pay.
Wall Street thinks Jersey City is a better place to build data centers than Manhattan.
As far as I know, JC didn't suffer massive infrastructure damage when Sandy came through either.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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 no one wants office space downtown, and they've been changing over many existing buildings into residential ones. People are either moving uptown or across the river to NJ.
Because that's all C.O.'s really are, glorified data centers.
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!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
To me it makes more sense to put this stuff in a light industrial area that happens to have decent connectivity (unlike the light industrial area where I have my stuff). If it's big enough some industrial neighbours would be happy enough to pay a bit to have the waste heat. You've then also got land costs down to a sane price so can afford to have a generator (or two - I've seen one that fired up during tests every month for nearly 20 years and then wouldn't start when it was needed) sitting in a shed outside the building.
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 you want to touch a server physically (why?) driving 20 miles just isn't a big deal.
5. Wall Street stopped putting its servers in Manhattan after 9/11, so you wouldn't put servers there for high frequency trading.
6. Most major telecom nexus points to the rest of the world aren't in the middle of large cities. There's no reason to have them there. In a large city you have a nexus for the city, which then has a connection to a nexus point off someplace sensible.
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 only a fraction of that space now.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...