IBM Deal Is Latest Project for Austin Market

IBM will build a 36,000-square-foot data center in Austin by June 2007 as part of an $863 million contract to consolidate information technology operations at 27 state agencies, state officials said Tuesday. Most of the media coverage of IBM’s customer win has focused on the enormous size of the project. But it also underscores the emergence of the Austin area as a white-hot market for data center development.

Here’s a summary of data center projects either proposed or finalized in 2006:

• Hewlett-Packard is building two large facilities in Austin as part of its huge data center consolidation project.consolidation.
• Zydeco Development announced plans for a 350 acre data center park in Austin.
• Digital Realty Trust bought two properties at Met Center Business Park in Austin, near Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. One is a fully-leased 45,000 square feet data center, and the other is a 75,000 SF empty facility slated for redevelopment.
• Microsoft began scouting sites in both Austin and San Antonio for a $600 million mega-data center.
• Citicorp is looking at sites in the Austin area for a $475 million data center project.

The exact site of the new state data center is not being disclosed, but data center will include tightly guarded space where 17 mainframe computers operated by the agencies will be consolidated into six and where about 1,200 servers will replace about 5,500 that are now spread statewide.