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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.
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'?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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?