TEAM to Build Data Center for Iowa Hospital

TEAM Companies and Iowa Health System will jointly own and operate a new data center in Waukee, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines. The facility will house the patient and employee records for Iowa Health System, and be managed by TEAM Companies, which is building a network of data centers in second-tier markets in the upper Midwest. TEAM has existing facilties in Cedar Falls, Iowa and Fitchburg, Wisconsin.

The 46,000 square foot data center in Waukee will be built in three phases, with a total investment of $45 million. The 16,000 square foot first phase is scheduled to open in the thrird quarter of 2009, and will cost $15 million to build. Iowa Health System will occupy half of phase, with the remaining space leased to other businesses.

Iowa Health System is the state’s largest health provider, employing more than 19,000 workers and treating one out of every four Iowans requiring medical care. The new facility will allow Iowa Health to store duplicate copies of patient health records 100 miles apart in TEAM facilities in Cedar Falls and Waukee.

The City of Seattle’s 108 Degree Data Center

The temperature rarely reaches 100 degrees in Seattle. But the weather report inside the City of Seattle’s data center showed an unhappy 108 degrees on Nov. 16, after the  the facility lost its cooling system. Bill Schrier, the CTO and Director of the city’s IT department, writes about the event on his blog.

The root cause of the outage was a failed power breaker on a pump for the water supply to the building housing the data center, which left the CRAC (computer room air conditioning) units without water. “We shut down a lot of servers and many services starting almost immediately,” writes Schrier. “Nevertheless the temperature in the data center rose to that toasty 108 degrees, setting a new record high (sort of) for Seattle.”

ATAC Data Center Serves Southwest Virginia

The entrance of the Advanced Technology and Applications Center in Duffield, Virginia.

When you mention data centers and Virginia, most folks think of Ashburn and other northern Virginia towns housing clusters of mission-critical facilities. But the state’s newest data center is about as far away from Ashburn as you can get and still be in Virginia.

OnePartner has opened its Advanced Technology & Applications Center (ATAC) in Duffield, a town about 400 miles southwest of Washington in a corner of Virginia nestled between Kentucky and Tennessee. The stand-alone data center opened in October with an anchor tenant, the Bank of Tennessee.

OnePartner has been certified as a Tier III data center by The Uptime Institute, which developed the tier system for data center reliability and runs a certification process managed by ComputerSite Engineering. OnePartner’s marketing stresses that ATAC is the “sole U.S. company providing outsourced commercial data center services” with a Tier III rating.

FirstBank Chooses i/o Data Centers

Colocation provider i/o Data Centers will design, build and operate a financial grade data center for FirstBank, the largest locally-owned bank in Colorado, the companies said Wednesday. FirstBank will occupy a custom suite in i/o Data Centers’ Scottsdale ONE data center facility as part of a multi-year agreement. The i/o site will serve as a disaster recovery facility for FirstBank, which currently has over 120 locations and serves more than 600,000 customers.

“With online banking becoming so prevalent in today’s society, FirstBank, as well as its customers, can have peace of mind knowing that their core IT is housed in a secure and reliable data center,” said Anthony Wanger, Senior Managing Director of i/o Data Centers. “We are committed to FirstBank and are pleased to have the opportunity to accommodate and assist them with their rapid growth and success by providing them with best-in-class data center space.”

Roundup: CRG West, Internap, Fujitsu, Tonaquint

Here’s a roundup of some of today’s data center industry headlines:

• CRG West says that cloud computing service provider AppNexus has added 2,000 square feet of data center space at its Wilshire Annex data center in Los Angeles. AppNexus cited CRG West’s usage-based power pricing as a key benefit. “CRG West delivers an offering that is a perfect fit for our business model, which has produced incredible growth over the past six months,” offered Helena May, COO at AppNexus. See the CRG West press release (PDF).
• Fujitsu has officially opened a new sustainable data center at Homebush Bay in Sydney. The three-story facility was designed with a closed loop system that the company says will reduce water usage by 80 percent.
• NADAGuides said it will use colocation and CDN services from Internap, the companies said yesterday. NADAguides.com is the world’s largest publisher of vehicle pricing and specification information. The site covers new and used cars and trucks.
• The Tonaquint Data Center in St. George, Utah held a ribbone cutting to mark the opening of  its new data center, which os focused on disaster recovery and online backup services.

JPMorgan Buys WaMu Assets

JPMorgan Chase has acquired the assets of Washington Mutual (WaMu) for $1.9 billion after the huge Seattle thrift was seized by banking regulators Thursday. The deal marked JPMorgan’s second acquisition of a failed institution, as it bought the assets of Bear Stearns in March. 

Washington Mutual had been seeking a buyer, but saw its financial condition deteriorate as depositors withdrew more than $16 billion between Sept. 15 and yesterday. JPMorgan Chase becomes the nation’s second-largest bank, trailing only Bank of America, and is rapidly becoming a major operator of advanced Internet data centers.

Data Centers Key to Lehman Sale to Barclays

What assets remain solid when the value of nearly all other financial assets are called into question? Data centers.

Lehman Brothers’ real estate, including two data centers, proved central to a deal yesterday in which Barclays agreed to pay $1.75 billion to acquire most of Lehman’s North American operations. The data centers and Lehman’s headquarters building accounted for $1.5 billion of the deal’s value, with the British bank  paying just $250 million in cash for Lehman’s North American investment banking and capital markets businesses.

The Lehman sale provides echoes of the March deal in which JPMorgan bought the assets of Bear Stearns, in which Bear’s two data centers and headquarters building accounted for much of the value of the $270 million sale price.

Dueling ‘Wall Street West’ Efforts in NY, Pa.

Officials in Binghamton, N.Y. are seeking to establish the area as “Wall Street West” to attract backup data centers for New York financial institutions. There’s just one problem: the state of Pennsylvania has been using Wall Street West for three years as the brand for its own effort to capture financial data centers.

Economic development officials from Broome County and Empire State Development met Friday in New York with Sen. Charles Schumer and about 25 representatives of New York City’s top real estate and financial institutions to tout opportunities in the Binghamton area. The group discussed upstate New York sites in Kirkwood, Endicott and Union that could be attractive for data centers.

The initiative’s boosters said it could be several years before a New York City firm decides to create a data backup site in the Binghamton area. Schumer noted that Scranton, Pa., is “another community that is under consideration” - suggesting that the Binghamton team is aware of the existing Pennsylvania “Wall Street West” effort.

Can A Floating Data Center Weather A Hurricane?

Google’s design for floating data centers, described in a patent application, addresses many of the cost issues that make operating a data center so expensive. In Google’s concept, the ocean would provide most of the energy to power and cool the servers and equipment, while also eliminating expenses for real estate and property taxes. As Larry Dignan points out, the design addresses many of the budget-busting features of the modern data center. ”I’d call it brilliant engineering, but the financial engineering could be even more impressive,” Larry writes.

It certainly makes for interesting reading. But can Google’s new design address the operational challenges of a floating oceanic data center? One of the biggest question marks is the facility’s ability to survive disasters. 

Would a Google data barge be able to weather a hurricane? Or a tsunami? In the past two weeks hurricanes have struck both the Gulf and Atantic coasts of the U.S., and Hurricane Ike is on track to threaten the western Gulf later this week. At first glance, the Google data barges seem even more exposed than the data center cargo ships proposed by IDC, which would be docked in harbors.  

Documenting Gustav’s Impact

Three years ago staffers at colocation provider Zipa received worldwide notice as they live-blogged the fury of Hurricane Katrina as it struck New Orleans. The Zipa crew was on the job again yesterday as the city weathered Hurricane Gustav, documenting the storm’s impact at GustavBloggers.com. Zipa, which along with DirectNIC is part of the InterCosmos Media Group,  is housed on the 10th and 11th floors of a 27-floor office tower near Lafayette Square.

“We were lucky this time,” Zipa CEO Sigmund Solares writes in a storm summary. “But we also were prepared—from the city to the state to the feds, to our company’s staff, which worked hard in the background to keep hundreds of thousands of clients and many emergency communications operational. Preparation makes a difference.”

The same can be said for local communications during the storm, including Internet connectivity, according to an analysis by Renesys.