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Sentinel Plans Large NJ Data Center
March 1st, 2010 : Rich MillerSentinel Data Centers and Russo Development have begun construction on a large multi-tenant data center facility in Somerset, New Jersey, the companies announced today. The companies have acquired a 22.5 acre site with an existing 230,000 square foot single-story structure, expandable to 330,000 square feet.
The project brings together two experienced players in the data center market. Sentinel operated three data centers in Massachusetts and Connecticut, which the company just sold to Digital Realty Trust. Russo has specialized in construction of single-tenant data center buildings for financial companies in North Jersey.
Pursuing Wholesale Model
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The new data center in Somerset will offer up to 160,000 square feet of wholesale data center space to enterprise customers. Sentinel has started construction on a dedicated on-site 69kV power substation, which will be supported by diverse paths from two transmission-grade utility switching stations, providing more than 40 megawatts of power to the facility. -
Core Services Opens NJ Data Center
February 23rd, 2010 : Rich MillerOracle solutions specialist Core Services Corp. has opened a new 50,000 square foot data center in Somerset, New Jersey, the company said Monday. The facility was previously a disaster recovery center for “a major Wall Street bank” and has a redundant dual path (2N) power infrastructure.
The new facility is the latest in a growing cluster of data centers in Middlesex and Somerset counties in New Jersey, where companies like Digital Realty Trust (DLR), DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT), Morgan Stanley and New York Internet all have active development projects.
“”With perpetually growing databases, the demand for world class data centers continues to rise,” said Jim Bistis, Core Services’ President and CEO. “The Somerset Data Center will facilitate Core Services’ ability to design, build, and maintain highly advanced Oracle ERP environments. This will allow Core Services to provide its clients with extraordinary speed, security, and reliable performance at all times.”
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Former Bear Stearns Data Center Sold
February 18th, 2010 : Rich MillerIt looks like JP Morgan Chase has sold one of the two Bear Stearns data centers it acquired in March 2008 when the investment bank collapsed.
Last week a unit of Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) acquired a portfolio of 16 properties totaling about 2.9 million square feet from J.P. Morgan Chase. The deal included a “650,000-square foot office campus/data center site in Whippany, New Jersey.”
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Russo Finds its Niche in NJ Data Centers
February 2nd, 2010 : Rich MillerSometimes you find a business niche. And sometimes, as with Russo Development, the niche finds you.
Russo is a commercial real estate developer that is a leading supplier of data centers for Wall Street and the providers that support it. Over the past decade the Hackensack, N.J. company has built seven major data center projects spanning 1.7 million square feet for clients including J.P. Morgan Chase, NYSE Euronext, Cervalis Managed Hosting and SunGard Availability Services.
What made Russo Development target this lucrative market? “We got into it by accident,” recalls Michael Pembroke, the company’s senior vice president of leasing and marketing. “In 1999 we ended up working with a tenant, Comdisco (now part of SunGard) that wanted to build a data center in one of our existing facilities. We ended up building a 300,000 square foot facility in Carlstadt, and then building two additional facilities. We now have a total of 600,000 square feet in three buildings in Carlstadt.”
New Jersey Specialists
Russo’s success in the data center market is rooted in the old real estate saying: “location, location, location.” The company’s expertise aligned neatly with the target market for Wall Street firms seeking mission-critical facilities. “We’re local to Northeast New Jersey, and this was the niche we saw in our market,” said Pembroke.At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, many Wall Street firms had secondary data centers in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Northern New Jersey. Regulators wanted to ensure that disaster recovery centers were distant enough so that a single event on the scope of a nuclear explosion couldn’t destroy both the primary and secondary facilities. That prompted financial firms to look beyond the five boroughs. In most cases that meant New Jersey, where local utility PSE&G had a track record working with data center tenants.
Russo typically locates and acquires prospective sites, often working with a prospective tenant with a data center requirement. The company has done both speculative data centers and build-to-suit projects, and delivers a powered shell, allowing the tenant to build out the data center area.
One-Stop Shop for Shell Space
“We do a lot of the process in-house, bird dogging the sites to find locations,” said Pembroke. “We have construction management staff and own the heavy equipment, so we can did much of the construction ourselves. We like to think of ourselves as a one-stop shop to build the exterior (of the data center) and let our clients focus on the interior.”The financial crisis of 2008 has had a major impact on the financial industry, and that extends to its data centers. Wall Street firms that ordinarily might choose to build new facilities have opted to preserve capital and meet short-term needs with colocation or wholesale data center space.
“Many of the companies we talked to haven’t been able to act, so have been forced to band-aid or take temporary space until they’re able to come into an autonomous facility of their own,” said Pembroke. “The capital markets have not loosened up enough yet.
Pent-Up Demand
But he believes financial sector will resume building and leasing. “These companies can’t choose whether or not to have a data center,” said Pembroke. “Sooner or later, this pent up demand has to be met. All of these data centers will continue to locate here.”But when Wall Street firms have the financial means to invest in stand-alone data centers, will they continue to do so? Or will more opt for the wholesale data center model, which has gained momentum during the economic downturn?
Wholesale providers build the data center, including the raised-floor rechnical space and the power and cooling infrastructure, and then lease the completed facility. The tenant pays a significant premium over typical leases for office space, but is spared the capital investment to construct the data center. In the wholesale model, users can also occupy their data center space in about eight months, rather than the one to two years needed to build an enterprise data center.
Eyeing The Wholesale Model
“We’re taking a hard look ourselves of being able to deliver different product types,” said Pembroke. “There’s a finite number of users in the marketplace that want 400,000 square-foot data centers. If they had the time and capital, they would have their own facility. But if they don’t have the time or capital, they may be forced to locate to a wholesale data center or colocation provider.“Very large companies are asking us to write a full turn-key solution and finance the whole thing,” he continued. “Traditional sources of financing have a lot of difficulty with this (data center) asset class. There’s a lot of (investment) funds out there that don’t develop data centers themselves but see data centers as a great opportunity.”
Pembroke believes that the data center business will be healthy in New Jersey for some time to come.
“This is a big part of our business and will continue to be,” he said. “New Jersey has everyone’s attention, and the one bright spot in the market right now is data centers.”
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Roundup: Cisco’s Space Router, AboveNet
January 25th, 2010 : John RathHere’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:
Cisco space router operates in orbit. On Monday Cisco announced that their Internet Routing in Space (IRIS) technology has achieved a major milestone with the successful in-orbit test of the Cisco IOS software’s networking capabilities and the company’s on-board router. The technology was aboard an Intelsat IS-14 commercial GEO satellite and launched November 23, 2009. The Cisco IRIS technology is a program to build a radiation-tolerant IP router for satellite and related spacecraft. Cisco vice president for the Global Government Solutions Group Steven Boutelle said “this milestone is another step in our strategy to expand borderless networks into space and redefine how satellite communications are delivered. This technology can help transform satellite communications around the world by reducing latency and increasing the efficiency.” Managed by Cisco and Intelsat the IRIS program is a Department of Defense Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD) and the payload will convert to commercial use following a three month JCTD in April 2010.
AboveNet connects all 20 Equinix U.S. data centers. Equinix (EQIX) and AboveNet (ABVT) announced that AboveNet has deployed operations to the Equinix New York-1 data center, marking the company’s deployment to all 20 of Equinix’s IBX centers in the U.S. AboveNet offers managed services, Ethernet, metro networks and a global Tier 1 optical IP network. Making use of the Equinix global services delivery platform, AboveNet will enhance peering capabilities with other Tier 1 networks. Equinix chief marketing officer Jarrett Appleby said “our partnership with AboveNet offers a strong Tier 1 network and high bandwidth connectivity solution options for the community of IBX participants while offering AboveNet significant new revenue opportunities and a national infrastructure for Tier 1 peering and future carrier Ethernet needs.” Equinix acquisition target Switch and Data announced that Lexent Metro Connect, a dark fiber network provider in New York, has become part of the Switch and Data GeoReach program. Lexent Metro Connect has also completed construction of a low-latency dark fiber network route to Switch and Data’s North Bergen site located in New Jersey. The GeoReach program is a select group of providers who have engineered their networks to meet the needs of the high-efficiency trading community.
Huawei to deploy DWDM platform for GlobeNet. Global telecommunications solution provider Huawei was selected to deploy a next generation DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) optical platform for network transport services company GlobeNet. The Huawei platform will connect GlobeNet’s cable landing station in southern New Jersey to its Point of Presence sites in New York city via two diverse paths. The diverse paths will allow GlobeNet to deliver services to their other sites in Brazil, Venezuela, Bermuda, Florida and others. The network solution provided by Huawei will support 10Gb per second, 40GB per second and future 100Gb per second wavelengths to competitively deliver advanced, high bandwidth services.
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The Politics of Data Centers: NY, Texas, Missouri
January 6th, 2010 : Rich MillerIn recent years we’ve seen data centers become embroiled in state politics on topics such as whether to build new state data centers to manage citizens’ tax and benefit issues, where to put those data centers, who to hire to operate them, and whether to offer tax incentives to establish a state as a destination for development. This week we’ve data center make headlines in several states.
New York: It’s been more than three years since we first reported on the infighting among New York State legislators about where to build a new state data center. Well, they’re still fighting. The Albany Times-Union reports that officials are still battling over the site location dispute. The NY state Office of General Services is evaluating 18 proposals by developers to build a 72,000 square-foot data center for the state’s Office for Technology. The leading contenders for the $99 million project are sites in Utica and the Mohawk Valley.
Texas: On Tuesday, state officials released an “agreement in principle” for restructuring an $863 million contract with IBM to consolidate the data centers of 27 state agencies into two streamlined and upgraded facilities, according to the Austin Statesman. The huge project was launched in 2007 but has been plagued by delays and equipment failures.
Missouri: The state General Assembly in Missouri hopes to consider targeted tax incentives that will help the state attract more data center projects. Business groups, including the Missouri Coalition for Data Centers, hope to build upon a cluster of enterprise disaster recovery data centers in the Kansas City, and boost interest in the development of the state’s abundant supply of limestone caves as data center facilities. Missouri is home to several existing underground data bunkers, including The Mountain Complex near Branson and the Springnet Underground in Springfield.
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Russo Plans Large North Jersey Data Center
December 7th, 2009 : Rich MillerNorthern New Jersey has been an active data center market, driven by demand the financial sector. It looks the area will soon have yet another large data center, and a financial firm is rumored to be the tenant. Last Thursday the Passaic County Planning Board gave conditional approval for a plan Russo Development to build a 284,342 square foot data center in Clifton.
The project is slated to be built in a former Automatic Data Processing facility on Main Avenue in Clinton. Russo Development has not identified the potential occupant, but Clinton officials have told local media they expect the tenant to be Credit Suisse, which has met with township economic development officials.
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Roundup: Equinix, Switch & Data, The Planet
November 11th, 2009 : John RathHere’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:
- Hibernia Atlantic expands to two Equinix data centers. Submarine transport cable provider Hibernia Atlantic announced Tuesday the expansion of its Global Financial Network(GFN) into the Equinix New York-2 and New York-4 data centers in Secaucus, New Jersey. The expansion from Hibernia aims to provide low latency, redundancy and connectivity to global banks and exchanges in the New York metro area. Hibernia’s GFN spans 24,000 Kilometers (14,913 miles) of fiber optic cables across key financial cities around the world. “Our continued GFN expansion in New York metro and in other major financial centers reflects our core commitment to provide ‘security through diversity’—our company philosophy that offers world-class, redundant solutions to our financial customers,” said Bob McMann, VP of Provisioning and Procurement for Hibernia
- Switch & Data selected by Pragma Securities. Switch & Data announced that Pragma Securities, a trading solutions provider has selected their New York Financial EcoCenter to optimize the performance of its quantitative trading solution. After an extensive diligence process Pragma selected the North Bergen, New Jersey data center to host its trading execution services, and will be one cross connect away from the other electronic trading customers in the site.
- Nimsoft introduces alliance program. Following the October launch of their Unified Monitoring Solutions, Nimsoft announced their charter members in the Unified Monitoring Alliance Tuesday. The new monitoring solution provides a total, unified view of both internal and external IT resources. The Unified Monitoring Alliance partners are made up of service providers, solution partners and technology development partners. Partners like FusionStorm, Ingram Micro, Shavlik, Service-now.com, Rackspace and many others are among the first to join the alliance. “The alliance not only expands opportunities for growth and collaborative innovation for our partners, but also effectively increases the breadth and depth of the systems monitoring and management solutions that Nimsoft offers to its customers,” said Nimsoft President Gary Read said
- The Planet signs Ayuda Networks. The Planet announced Tuesday that Ayuda Networks has signed on to join the company’s recently launched Partner Plus program. Ayuda Networks consults with clients to evaluate connectivity requirements and implement the best solutions for their specific business. Ayuda will add The Planet to its portfolio of top-tier solution providers and include them in recommendations to clients evaluating managed and dedicated hosting, as well as colocation services.
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DataPipe Acquires NJ Data Center
October 7th, 2009 : Rich Miller
Managed hosting provider DataPipe has acquired its seventh data center, adding a third data center facility in Somerset, New Jersey, the company said today. The new facility is a 55,000 square foot data center that was previously used by a multi-national financial services firm. The site can support 45,000 square feet of raised floor with a critical power load of 8 megawatts.The “Somerset Three” facility follows the 2006 acquisition of the company’s first Somerset facility and the 2008 expansion into a second facility. Upgrades to the power infrastructure and the implementation of three-factor security systems are expected to be complete for an April, 2010 opening.
The acquisition continues the strong activity in the New Jersey data center market. In recent months, New York Internet has announced a new facility in Bridgewater, while HCL America has acquired a data center in Parisppany. Equinix has also been building out additional space in its data center complex in Secaucus.
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