Friday, September 12, 2008

Inside Real Estate

Power and telecom demands help push data center colocation

By Dann Anthony Maurno, Special to Mass High Tech

The popular perception is that the enterprise data center is dead, rendered obsolete by cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS). Yet it seems that every third-party data center in Massachusetts is adding square footage and wattage.

“The company that provides the cloud computing and SaaS still needs a physical infrastructure, and we provide it from here,” said Jeff Flanagan, a vice president and the manager of the 800,000-square-foot Markley Group data center at One Summer Street in Boston. This monolith has been sitting quietly on 2.5 acres near Downtown Crossing since 1999, housing more than 170 clients (including the Boston Red Sox).

This is “colocation,” in which an enterprise locates its data center in a highly specialized third-party property, and colocation is on the rise. In late 2007, CRG West opened its 10th colocation center at 70 Innerbelt in Somerville, and is already on its third expansion, adding 17 megawatts of power and about 50,000 square feet.

Why the growing need?
As CRG West senior vice president David Dunn describes, “The amount of data that companies aggregate, all the financial data, has exploded, and particularly in New England which is the base of industries like insurance companies, universities, biotech firms.” Consider regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley calling for long-term e-record retention. “You used to be able to reasonably predict what you’d need, and build your own data center, but now there’s huge variability in two or three years. Do you build what you may need, or only what you do need?” At a colocation center, a company needs to only lease more square footage if its needs grow.

Besides, the colocation companies argue, their value proposition is hard for an enterprise to duplicate in its own facility.

“Nothing costs more to build than a data center,” says CRG West vice president Thomas Traugott, who manages the 70 Innerbelt property. “They are highly specialized real estate, costing between $1,000 and $2,000 per square foot.”

A robust data center requires exacting temperature and humidity control, round-the-clock physical and video surveillance, and multi-tiered fire protection and suppression, including clean-agent suppression alongside sprinkler systems. And, they require backup power. Few Financial District landlords would allow tenants to house generators on a roof or store diesel fuel in a basement.

Traugott added, “An office building is built for nine to five, meaning your cooling plant is only running nine to five. And an office building might be rated for 30 pounds per square foot, where some of these mainframes weigh 2,000 pounds,” on a footprint of less than four square feet.

“A data center isn’t something that can go everywhere, and you wouldn’t want it to.”

Where colocation facilities do go is near a city or in the heart of it, which is their advantage, says Markley Group president Jeff Markley. “The infrastructure downtown with regard to power and communication is far superior to infrastructure in suburbs, We have 43 carriers,” he said, claiming that a suburban facility might have a couple.

Both the Markley and CRG West data centers are “carrier neutral” — the carriers, like Comcast Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., British Telecom and Qwest, compete to sell bandwidth, and switching carriers is nearly as simple as rerouting a cable. Carrier-neutral colocation properties are also known as “carrier hotels.”

Carriers that branch into the suburbs might lease lines from other carriers. “So a kid shooting a BB gun can take it out, or a car sliding on the ice can take down all the carriers,” says Markley. “We have 43 carriers on separate routes in metal conduits encased in concrete in the ground.”

In the end, locating a data center “Is all about the power,” says Christopher Tosti, an executive vice president and partner with commercial real estate firm CB Richard Ellis-New England. “You need redundant power and lots of it, at any facility that claims to be a data center. Equipment, air conditioning, backup — that’s all power related.” CB Richard Ellis is involved in numerous data center purchases and leases across the U.S., including the Sentinel Data Center in Needham.

To put it in perspective, a typical office building would require maybe 10 watts per square foot, and a good robust data center might need 200. Tosti estimates that 85 percent of the cost per square foot of a data center is the cost of power.

And that power requirement, like the data requirement, continues to burgeon. “People are looking to put more servers into a rack and run at a higher electrical density,” says Flanagan of CRG West. He points out that a data center five years ago might have required 100 watts per square foot where 180 to 200 is more typical, and the Markley Group provides one customer 348 watts per square foot in a unique configuration.

The green data center

Yes, corporations are asking for the green data center, but it may not be the same definition of “green” that is associated with environmentally friendly manufacturing or residential recycling. In most cases, the green that corporations look for in a data center is cash — savings on their energy bills.

“They are less interested in a greener environment than having their power costs go down,” said Mike Frank, vice president for data center services at colocation firm Internap Network Services Corp., which provides data centers worldwide, including a facility owned by CRG West in Somerville and one being built nearby.

Frank said that data center customers are concerned about saving on energy costs — 40 percent of which goes to cooling — and ensuring that a colocation firm is able to provide enough power and space to grow their applications.

Computers crash when they generate too much heat. Server and chip vendors are designing more efficient systems, but other technologies have progressed to a point where data center operators can offer new ways to cool the glass house.

Frank said the new, 50,000-square-foot Somerville facility will take advantage of Boston’s cold weather, drawing cold air into the building rather than relying only on air conditioning. The roadblock in the past had been that cold air is dry, leading to static electricity. The evolution of ultrasonic humidification equipment now allows Internap to more efficiently add moisture to outside air. Other new technologies allow Internap to draw hot air from the ceiling, cool it with air conditioners and move it down through walls to where it can blow out across the floor.

jconnolly@masshightech.com | 617-241-4338

 

Dann Anthony Maurno is a freelance writer in Salem.