Paetec Plans Data Center Near Boston

ISP and hosting provider PAETEC Holding Corp. (PAET) has announced plans for a 92,700 square foot data center in Andover, Mass., north of of Boston. PAETEC says the Andover facility will be the first step in a national expansion of its data center network, which currently includes sites in Bethlehem, Pa. and Conshohocken, Pa. The Andover center is scheduled to open in June 2010.

“This data center will meet the growing data-oriented demands of large businesses around the country,” said Charles Field, vice president and general manager for the New England region. “As common business applications are moving towards the cloud, we’ll be there to serve them with the industry-leading service our customers have come to expect.”

CoreSite Plans Expansion in Boston Area

Data center and colocation service provider CoreSite will expand its data center in Boston.

CoreSite will expand its Boston data center located at 70 Innerbelt Road in Somerville, Mass., adding 12,000 square feet of space in the second quarter of 2010. The new space will be capable of cooling high performance computing environments, and will feature access to CoreSite’s Any2 Northeast Internet exchange.

The announcement continues the growth at CoreSite, a provider of wholesale data center and colocation space that recently completed an expansion project in northern Virginia and is adding data center space in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley.  

Roundup: Michigan, Massachusetts, Juniper

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

Michigan releases shared data center RFI. The Michigan Department of Information Technology (MDIT) in conjunction with the state’s Department of Treasury and Department of Management and Budget, issued a request for information (RFI) seeking feedback on forming a public-private partnership to build and operate the facility.  In September 2009 Michigan CIO Ken Theis detailed the plans for what could be a 100,000 square foot facility to run cloud services not only for the state government but for the public sector as well.  The RFI released on January 7th looks for “input from companies or teams of companies that are interested in financing, building and operating the new facility, as well as providing shared IT services to state agencies and others.”  The project is being positioned as a magnet for technology-related economic development and is expected to break ground in October 2010.

$110 million state data center for Massachusetts. A $110 million state data center will be built in Springfield Massachusetts to serve as a backup facility to the main data center in Chelsea. The 115,000 square foot facility is scheduled to be completed in May 2012. Stuart D. Lecky, of the state’s Information Technology Division, said that the data center will be “a critical backup facility that we don’t have today.”  Claiming 50 to 70 percent more energy efficiency than any state facility, great importance is being placed on making it a showcase green data center.  Thirty-five people will be employed at opening, with 70 estimated when fully staffed.

Juniper in SSL VPN magic quadrant. Juniper Networks announced they have been positioned in the ‘Leaders’ quadrant of Gartner’s recently published Magic Quadrant for SSL VPNs.  Evaluation and placement in the quadrant is based on the ability to execute and completeness of vision.  Juniper’s vice president and general manager of the Access and Acceleration Business Unit Sanjay Beri said “Juniper has a long history of delivering competitively disruptive solutions in the marketplace. By aggressively innovating and delivering market leading functionality and reliability on our SSL VPN product line for all use cases—from remote access to partner access to disaster recovery to mobile access—we continue to stay ahead of the curve in delivering a superior remote/LAN access solution for our enterprise and service provider customers worldwide.”

MIT Team Weighs $100M Green Data Center

A proposed data center project in western Massachusetts has brought together MIT, The University of Massachusetts, Cisco Systems and EMC Corp., who plan to work jointly on developing a $100 million facility showcasing “green” technologies.

News of the data center initiative in Holyoke, Mass., which is scheduled to be announced Thursday, comes just three weeks after the unveiling of a project in Syracuse, N.Y. featuring similar cooperation between the private sector and academia. The Holyoke project will be a high-performance computing resource for academic and research institutions in Massachusetts, according to the Boston Globe.   

The Holyoke location would allow the data center to use hydroelectric power from the Connecticut River, and can access fiber routes along the nearby Mass Pike. The four partners would all participate in the funding, and may recruit additional participants as well.   

Hosted Solutions Upgrades Boston Facility

Hosted Solutions has completed more than $6 million in upgrades to its Boston data center, with improvements in power, cooling, back-up power and security. With the upgrades, Hosted Solutions has begun offering a suite of managed services including application management, managed replication, disaster recovery, load balancing and advanced monitoring.

“We have seen tremendous momentum with our customer growth throughout New England,” said Mike Lee, Regional Manager for Hosted Solutions. “Given current market conditions, companies today require a trusted partner who can provide them with services across all areas of IT, rather than simply providing data center space or point solutions. Increasingly, companies recognize both the immediate and ongoing value of having a trusted partner provide them with the full range of outsourced technology services.

Massachusetts Picks Site for $76M Facility

The state of Massachusetts will spend $76 million to transform a former high school in Springfield into a major new data center, which will supplement the state’s primary facility in Chelsea. The project has been in the works for several years while state legislators have been wrangling over the best location for the new investment. The former Springfield Technical High School was selected over the Springfield Technical Community College.

The site location decision was based on a “thorough, impartial technical analysis” by the state Division of Capital Asset Management (DCAM), the Information Technology Division (ITD) and an unnamed outside consultant. The review found that the Tech High site would save the state millions of dollars in procurement and construction costs.

“The second data center in Springfield will allow us to better manage and protect the systems that provide essential services to our citizens,” said Anne Margulies, the state’s Chief Information Officer. “The Second Data Center is also a key part of our strategy to manage our technology in a more cost effective manner and to become a national model for green and environmental friendly data centers.”

Rhode Island Seeking Site for Data Center

The state of Rhode Island is seeking a 50,000 to 70,000 square foot building to serve as the new state data center, replacing an aging facility housed in a former used car lot. The state Department of Administration has placed newspaper ads seeking property owners in the Providence area interested in selling their building.   

The Providence Journal notes that the data center relocation effort is being launched as Rhode Island faces a huge budget deficit. Amy Kempe, a spokesperson for Gov. Donald Carcieri, said the search is driven by the condition of the existing state data center. “The current center is a former used-car-lot building that is in poor shape and has more value to the surrounding businesses in the area,” Kempe told the Journal. “By relocating the IT department, the building and land can be sold at the appropriate time.”

Strong Activity in Boston Data Center Market

Recent reports on the Boston area data center market feature one large requirement for a new facility, and an active colocation market in which several providers say they’re seeing strong demand.

TJX Cos. Inc. is seeking a location to build a 150,000 square foot data center, according to real estate sources in the Boston market. TJX has its headquarters in Framingham, Mass. and is hoping to find a site that can accommodate a short-term data center project as well as the company’s long-term plans to add up to 600,000 square feet of office space.

Colocation demand in the Boston market is keeping data center providers busy, according to a profile in Mass High Tech that discusses recent activity at CRG West, Internap Network Services (INAP) and the Markley Group, which owns the One Summer Street carrier hotel. The story notes Internap’s recent expansion at CRG’s 70 Innerbelt project, as well as the role of increasing power loads in customer decisions to seek third-party data center space.

[2N+1] Readies New Boston Data Center

Two veterans of the Boston-area data center community are building a new facility. Vincent Bono and Will Locandro have formed [2N+1] (yes, the brackets are part of the company name) to build a new 45,000 square foot data center in a fiber-rich neighborhood in Somerville, Mass., according to Xconomy. The new colocation center is across the street from a local utility NSTAR, which is providing 12 megawatts of power to support power density of 250 watts per square foot.

[2N+1] is described as “something of a boutique operation” targeting customers needing between 250 and 5,000 square feet of colocation space. “Those are the customers that are historically the least amount of trouble to work with,” said Bono, who worked as a data center designer for HarvardNet and Boston Datacenters.. “Very large companies want you to offer all of these ancillary managed services that we don’t want to get into. And very small customers want you to essentially be their IT team, and we don’t want to do that, either.” The new data center is scheduled to open for business next month.