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Sears Is Turning Shuttered Stores Into Data Centers
miller60 writes "Servers may soon fill the aisles where shoppers once roamed. Sears Holdings is seeking to convert former Sears and Kmart stores into Internet data hubs. Some stand-alone stores and distribution centers may be repurposed as data centers, while mall-based stores can be converted into disaster recovery sites, the company says, offering access to stores and eateries for displaced workers who may be on site for weeks. Then there's the wireless tower opportunity. Seventy percent of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Sears or Kmart store, and these rooftops can be leased to fill gaps in cell coverage. It's not the first effort to convert stores into IT infrastructure, as Rackspace is headquartered in an old mall, and companies have built data centers in malls in Indiana and Maryland. But Sears, which operates 25 million square feet of real estate, hopes to make this strategy work at scale." Also at Slash DataCenter.
Your data back.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
New HDD in Isle 6, New HDD in Isle 6!
I don't understand why place data centers in urban mall environments where property value is supposedly higher?
... or malls that have closed completely. But very few mall management firms would sign off on turning one of their anchor stores into a datacenter.
recycling, good to see that these structures will serve a purpose beside being shopping stores! :)
good thing this wasn't posted at the end of March. I'd never believe it -- it sort of has that "too silly to not be true" feel about it.
Maybe Orange Julius can solve the IPv6 problem?
there is a blue light special on red light web sits to day.
red light as in web sites that have slowed down to a stop.
It scares me that anyone would think there would or should be any economic viability in 'disaster recovery sites.'
They are everywhere, and are never re-purposed. As for Sears, they are mostly in malls, and I can't see a datacenter being allowed in a mall.
They allow centers for guitars, why not allow them for data?
Data centers are designed from the ground up for cooling. This could mean an 85' by 125' room with 8 double-decker bus sized air handelers outside the room just for cooling it. I don't see a preexisting building the size of a kmart able to accommodating that. Next is grounding and lightning protection. The massive amounts of grounding loops and rods that go in the ground prior to pouring the slab of a properly designed data center is quite something. They will have no choice but to tear out nearly all of the concrete floor and replace it. Running it overhead is not optional in a proper data center. You need loops that can break or corrode and still maintain grounding. Their best bet is to completely tear down the entire building and build it from the ground up properly for cooling and lightning protection. Trust me.:o
Sears is the worst-managed and worst-run company I can imagine. Several years ago, I tried _several times_ to buy a range hood from Sears.com. My order was deleted from the system multiple times, even after I called tech support and had them input the order on their end. I decided that I would never give Sears another cent (or, more to the point, never attempt to give Sears another cent, because they're unable to actually accept payment), and I haven't. Too bad to see Craftsman tools die, but maybe Home Depot or some vulture capitalist will keep that line alive.
Farney acknowledges that many of Sears’ mall-based retail locations aren’t viable for data center usage. “I don’t think the industry is yet ready for a mall-based data center,” he said. “That may take some time. The stand-alone location is optimal.”
Is it a coincidence that MS just said they were upgrading their servers from 15, 000 to 300, 000? Gotta put'em somewhere.
This is just as stupid as the other stuff Sears has done (or not done) over the last 20 years to slowly go out of business. Sears and K-mart stores are "retail" land uses and are located on land appropriate for retail. This means that there is a) a sizable nearby population base to draw customers from, b) access via high-volume roadways, c) lots of onsite parking, d) other retail nearby to draw retail customers, etc. None of these are important for a "Data Center" which can be located (and often is) in a rural and/or low-population-density area. Converting high-value retail real estate into 'data center' real estate is the same thing as taking $100 bills and burning them to start the bbq. Monumentally stupid...and typical for Sears.
"70% of the US population lives within 10 miles of a Sears/Kmart store" ...there is something strangely disturbing about this fact.
HP used to have a big office park in Palo Alto that was converted from an old indoor mall. Recycling big buildings isn't a bad idea.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
That would be poetic... justice.
When Sears purchased Kmart, some discussion related to the fact that Kmart holdings wasn't a retail company - it was a real estate investment company that happened to have stores on its investment property. This is the same - Sears owns a lot of property and this lets them pay for taxes and upkeep until they unload it.
fencepost
just a little off
They should turn ALL Sears stores into data centers!
I wouldn't trust their IT experience.
We were stuck on something akin to a shared T1, with a single computer/printer to handle the entire store's marketing (read: pricing signage), with a single-process print lookup interface that didn't have a template for our store. As a result, we spent at least 4 hours every morning just manually printing signage for the store, more or less one sign at a time (You could queue up multiples of the same sign, or a print a department in the rare circumstance the signage needing was accurate (one or two departments did.) However in all other cases you had to sit and wait, and wait, and wait for the necessary data to be pulled over the network, and reload for each different size of signage or department you were printing for.)
Sear's problems are MUCH MUCH MUCH larger than this indicates and pretty much goes from the lowest levels of management to the very top, utilizing outdated software and hardware that obviously hasn't been factored into either reducing employee time or long term infrastructure investment. Additionally, I don't know if it's still true, but when I was working there they were still using 10+ year old palm pilots with pre-802.11b wifi interfaces and barcode readers for handling markdown and RTM checks. Not to say they were particularly bad pieces of equipment (certainly faster than the aforementioned signage software), but we still had at least one failure a week with them and no long term replacement strategy.
For some reason, every time they want to put up a new store, they build new. Meanwhile, when the old stores get closed they just sit and the building never gets used. It's almost like ringworm, you get this ever expanding ring of dead stores that expands out for the city center. Every day I drive by 3 abandon grocery stores and even worse, new construction for 2 new stores of about the same size!
Its good to hear they are doing something with at least some of them.
Whoever can achieve the highest ratio of computing power to recurring costs for IT maintenance, rent, bandwidth, and electricity wins. When Jeffrey Skilling gets out, he can set up a company that acts as a broker for data center services.
Retailers have been doing this kind of thing for many, many years. The first indoor big box shopping mall every built (Southdale) was built just to have a place to attach a Dayton's store too. I got my start in IT in operations for a large retailer, working with the real estate team in setting up and closing down store properties was part of my job. Many retailers have as much business in real estate as they do in retail and this has been the case for years.
By way of point Home Depots are often located near Target or Walmart since they buy large tracts of land for their stores and as a defensive measure to keep the other companies store from being put up nearby. They then use the best space for their own and develop strip malls around their property. When they have a lot just the right size for a big box retailer they will lease it to someone like Home Depot just to keep the land from being used by the competitors as many cities have will build taxes for unused property.
McDonalds has been known to buy a large tract of land and build a strip mall just to ensure that they get a restaurant in a prime location. When stores closed down the realtors then find other uses for the store. This is something that the retailers have been doing for decades with professionally run and managed real estate companies that they own. There are even special tax exemptions to allow these operations with special discounts.
When Icahn wanted to do a hostile takeover on Target a year or two back his highest priority to get in - sell their property off for great profit - and get out. The only thing that is new about this case is that Sears wants to get into the data center hosting business. If they bring in professionals (which the article says is exactly what they are doing) to run it there is no reason that you couldn't see Sears do very well in a very short time doing this.
Maybe their high end cloud offering can be "Bits end" or "Wired End".
"Disaster Recovery", huh. Sounds like a cover for a Z-day survival stash. Everyone knows to head to the mall at first sign of a mysterious outbreak, right?
Well, a lot of other factors come in. Two big ones:
a) cooling
and
b) power
Another one is structure strength. Depending on what was actually in the floor-space, I wonder about a location's ability to handle a lot of heavy racks and HVAC equipment etc. Believe it or not the weight of all that stuff can be a consideration.
I was working for Sears (as a retail minion) when they mostly shut down their paper catalog operations, as the internet was becoming a thing.
I saw it then as a huge mistake, as with their experience with order processing and shipping they would have had a HUGE head start against upstarts like Amazon.
But corporate inertia, along with MBA's probably would have ruined them anyway.
yah its wasn't a real Hutch but they licensed the name. But hey when you're 14 and its 1/3 the price of a real one you'll love it just as much.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Made a pretty good datacenter too. Already had a loading dock, concrete slab floor, & plenty of HVAC installation points.
And thus it was that Skynet was created in the middle of suburbia... invading all aspects of our daily lives. I for one welcome our new distributed datacentre/robot overlords.
What happens to this endeavor when AT&T decide to do the same thing with the thousands of redundant exchange buildings they have?
When Amazon buys sears not for their retail system but for their IT infrastructure....
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It took me a while to understand why it would be possible to abandon in-city retail place, but I think I got the idea: since all US shoppers go the retail place in their car, there is not more value for a specific place in the town, you can just open a new place a bit more far away, shoppers will follow.
I was thinking what competitive advantage would these Sears stores offer? I think there will eventually be data center clusters in remote places of northern Canada, near cheap hydroelectric dams. Data is very cheap to transport long distance, why not take advantage of that?
We could no longer afford to shop at sears.
When Sears purchased Kmart, some discussion related to the fact that Kmart holdings wasn't a retail company - it was a real estate investment company that happened to have stores on its investment property.
Legally, Kmart bought Sears.
Kmart had gone through bankruptcy, and emerged having reduced its debts and liabilities. But the remaining stores still weren't making much money. So it had a large amount of mostly-unprofitable stores, and a large amount of fairly valuable real estate. (which speaks to your point.)
Kmart "bought" Sears as a way of converting its real estate assets into an active business again.
It seems like every Sears and KMart I've ever been in while there was heavy rain showed leaks in the roof. Unless they plan on using that as auxiliary cooling I sure hope the structures are carefully evaluated prior to putting infrastructure in.
"Sears Holdings is seeking to convert former Sears and Kmart stores into Internet data hubs."
I just shipped my server.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I03UmJbK0lA