A look at some of EMC's data center infrastructure. The company is opening a new cloud data center and research lab in Durham, North Carolina.

EMC today announced a new data center and Center of Excellence lab in Durham, North Carolina that will power the company’s cloud computing operation. The 450,000 square foot facility will house a 30,000 square foot data center running IT applications to support EMC’s 50,000 employees around the globe, as well as more than 130,000 square feet of research and development space.

The new data center will replace an existing facility in Westborough, Mass. which is out of space. Over the next year, EMC will shift more than 6 petabytes of data from Westborough to the new highly-virtualized facility in Durham. Once the migration is complete, the Westborough facility willbe retired. EMC will continue to maintain a disaster recovery data center in Hopkinton, Mass.

Another Project for North Carolina
EMC becomes the latest in a series of leading technology companies to choose North Carolina as the location for new data centers, a list that includes Apple, Google, Facebook, Cisco, American Express, IBM and NetApp, among others.

EMC said the data center will include energy efficiency features, including the use of outside air (free cooling) for approximately 57 percent of the year, a col-aisle containment system to manage airflow within the data center, and flywheel UPS systems to save space and reduce reliance on batteries. The company expects that the facility will earn Silver certification under the LEED standard for sustainable buildings, and operate with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of about 1.3.

EMC runs more than 500 applications in its five corporate data centers. The company also maintains Centers of Excellence in India, China, Egypt, Israel, Ireland, and Russia. The Centers of Excellence perform  engineering and research and development, translation services and  technical support.

‘Virtual First’ as Mantra

“We are pleased to extend EMC’s network of COEs around the globe by increasing our IT and R&D presence in North Carolina,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, EMC Chief Information Officer and COO, Global Centers of Excellence. ” Our virtual-first mantra and the latest EMC, VMware and VCE technologies, not only provided the foundation to deliver agility to our more than 50,000 employees, but the COE, data center and our R&D labs enable us to extend and showcase our world-class cloud computing capabilities, solutions and the best practices with our customers.”

“As a leading global technology innovator, EMC has put its money where its mouth is with its new COE and cloud data center,” said Charles King, Principal Analyst, Pund-IT. “By doing so, the company has opened the doors to harness the agility of cloud computing for its employees.  Its efforts should also help EMC customers develop their own virtualization and cloud computing initiatives.”

In 2004, EMC’s IT organization began moving from a physical to a highly-virtualized IT infrastructure. The new EMC data center provides the foundation required for cloud computing with an architecture that will leverage EMC’s latest information infrastructure technologies, VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies, and Vblock Infrastructure Platforms from VCE (the Virtual Computing Environment Company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel).

An aerial view of the 450,000 square foot building housing EMC's new data center in Durham, North Carolina.

]]> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/09/15/emc-opens-new-cloud-data-center-in-nc/feed/ 3 http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/07/11/time-warner-cable-plans-data-center-in-charlotte/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/07/11/time-warner-cable-plans-data-center-in-charlotte/#comments Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:21:40 +0000 Rich Miller http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/?p=52321

An illustration of plans for a $100 million data center for Time Warner Cable in Charlotte, North Carolina.

North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue is getting plenty of experience unveiling new data center projects. Today Perdue announced that Time Warner Cable will invest $101 million in an expansion of its campus in Charlotte, which will include a 178,000 square foot data center. The project is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2012, but will be designed so that Time Warner Cable can double the size of the data center to accommodate future growth.

“Time Warner Cable looked around the country, and they chose North Carolina,” said Perdue. The project adds to a growing list of data center wins for North Carolina, which includes facilities for Google, Apple, Facebook, Wipro/Infocrossing, American Express and perhaps Walt Disney.

Incentives Helped Clinch Deal

As in the earlier data center projects, North Carolina offers generous incentives to the company – in this case, a state grant from the Job
Development Investment Grant program that could yield $2.9 million in benefits if the company meets its job creation goals. Time Warner Cable (TWC) says its expansion will add 225 new jobs at an average salary of $61,044 a year, although some of those jobs will likely be based at an office building included in the project.

The expansion is part of a broader shift by Time Warner Cable to feature more managed hosting and cloud computing services. Earlier this year TWC bought NaviSite, paying $230 million to acquire a service platform, 10 data centers and 1,200 customers.

Those data centers are apparently not enough. The new Charlotte facility will house 1,600 racks of technical equipment on a 12,000 square foot raised floor. The building offers a virtual cloud environment, allowing for quicker deployment of TWC’s products, which include video, high speed data and commercial services by having storage and network elements in a shared environment.

“The National Data Center allows TWC to focus on delivering services for customers with greater effectiveness and reliability and with less cost and environmental impact,” said Jim Ludington, executive vice president of national network operations and engineering, Time Warner Cable. “Opening a data center in Charlotte underscores our commitment to provide the best mix of technology necessary to service our customers.”

The Shelby Star reports that a  deed filed with Cleveland County dated May 24 indicates Disney Worldwide Services, Inc. purchased 26 acres of land at the T5 data center park near Ingles. City and county officials have repeatedly declined comment on the purchase, instead referring calls to the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

Sources indicate that the land purchased by Disney is a different tract from the property where T5 has just finished construction on a data center building. The 146,000 square foot powered shell on a parcel at Kings Mountain is still available for lease (PDF). The site has up to 120 megawatts of power available from Duke Energy at rates between 3.9 and 4.6 centers per kilowatt hour, according to T5.

The first project at the Kings Mountain campus was a retrofit of a 215,000 square foot shell building that was previously used by Chris-Craft Inc.  to manufacture power boats. Managed hosting provider Wipro Infocrossing has leased the entire building, and plans to invest $75 million in the new facility.

If Disney is indeed the tenant, it will continue a string of major data center wins for western North Carolina, which now is home to server farms for three hot tech firms – Google, Apple and Facebook.

If a deal materializes, it would continue a strong of huge data center wins for western North Carolina, which is already home to server farms for Google, Apple and Facebook. The state has benefited from a combination of affordable power and generous tax incentives.

Excitement vs. Secrecy

State officials refused comment on chatter that a brand-name company would locate a data center in Cleveland County, while local officials were sought to balance excitement and the secrecy typical of these projects.

“There is possibly a huge announcement coming for the area of Cleveland and Gaston counties,” state Rep. Kelly Hastings wrote on Facebook. “You will recognize the name.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny anything,” State Rep. Tim Moore told the Star, “but I do know the answer.”

T5 is a data center development company led by former data center specialists with The Staubach Company. The company is focusing on North Carolina, and marketing multiple sites for major end users. T5 is currently building a second data center at its Kings Mountain campus, where IT outsourcing firm Wipro leased its first building.

Affordable Power, and Lots of It

T5 has just finished construction on a 146,000 square foot powered shell on a parcel at KingsMountain that can support nearly 600,000 square feet of  data center space. The site has up to 120 megawatts of power available from Duke Energy at rates between 3.9 and 4.6 centers per kilowatt hour, according to T5.

That type of power cost and capacity has been a key factor in helping North Carolina winning a series of major data center deals. Here’s a recap:

• In early 2007 Google announced plans to build a $600 million data center in Lenoir, a town of 17,000 residents in Caldwell County.
• In 2009 Apple chose the small town of Maiden (population 3,300) in Catawba County for a $1 billion data center campus.
• In November 2010, Facebook unveiled plans to invest $450 million in a new data center facility in Forest City (pop. 7,500) in Rutherford County.

With those major industry players already in place, who might the new prospect be? Stay tuned.

The Republican-led state Senate voted last week to direct Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue to locate at least $400 million in budget cuts, along with up to $80 million in cuts from incentive programs used to bring new companies to North Carolina. The programs targeted for cuts include the Golden LEAF Fund and the One North Carolina Fund, which are among an array of funds used to structure incentives to data center operators.

“The proposed cuts to North Carolina’s jobs and economic development funds will damage our ability to recruit new jobs and to expand existing businesses in the state,” Perdue said in a statement. “I am truly surprised that Senate leadership is considering taking North Carolina’s jobs money as a way to balance the budget. It won’t work – and what’s more, our people won’t work if we can’t bring new companies and new industries to our state. We have many hundreds of new jobs in the pipeline right now, and they depend on that money. If we don’t win those projects, those jobs go somewhere else. It’s that simple.”

Any reduction in North Carolina’s ability to offer economic incentives could be good news for Virginia. The two states have competed for a number of large data center projects in recent years, including the Apple project and a Microsoft facility that was won by Virginia. Perdue noted the competitive threat posed by Virginia.

“Other Southern states, notably Virginia, have called for an increase in similar funds so they can take our jobs away,” she said.

The cuts would affect future projects, and are not currently expected to impact  incentives for companies that have already agreed to locate projects in North Carolina. There’s more legislative action ahead before any cuts are finalized, but we’ll continue to track this issue.

Instor and Electrorack said they have completed a project providing tailor-made enclosures for an unnamed client at a large data center in North Carolina. The vendors said the units were “built specifically to address the owner’s precise and unique requirements concerning airflow, cable management and equipment mounting.”

Instor and Electrorack wouldn’t comment on the identity of their client. They were hired by Holder Construction, whose many data center projects include Apple’s 500,000 square foot iDataCenter in Maiden, North Carolina. While Instor and Electrorack aren’t talking, the project description suggests a massive facility.

Changing the Playing Field

“This data center has truly changed the playing field in terms of size, efficiency, and engineering, and we were thrilled to have the opportunity to bring our expertise to the table to make it a reality,” said Todd Schneider, Senior Product Manager at Electrorack.  “Outfitting a landmark data center on this scale while adhering to highly-aggressive implementation schedules – and producing one-off solutions – was achievable only through Electrorack’s unique, innovative design and manufacturing processes. It’s what separates us from other enclosure manufacturers.”

Electrorack makes enclosures and cooling products for the data center industry, and recently became a unit of Legrand, North America.

Instor provides data center infrastructure solutions and partners with manufacturers who make products for the data center, including intelligent power distribution and monitoring, environmental monitoring, asset management, KVM, and custom server enclosures.

Micro Changes in a Macro Environment

“We chose Electrorack chiefly for their ability to make design changes within a large-scale project to address specific needs on a timely basis,” said Bob Hancock, President of Instor Solutions.  “There were times when changes to specific racks had to be made to accommodate certain third-party systems, and Electrorack was able to make micro changes in a macro-production environment that resulted in an uninterrupted delivery schedule.”

“The current trend in large-scale data center deployment is for the owners to control the design and configuration of the enclosures versus making trade-offs with off-the-shelf cabinets,” commented Scott Shew, Electrorack’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing. ”We saw this trend coming years ago, and positioned Electrorack to rapidly manufacture tailor-made enclosures while remaining competitive within today’s economic environment. Our collaborative process ensures that the resulting designs protect data centers from obsolescence while positioning them to address thermal, power, and space issues.”

Apple has had little to say about its data center project, leaving tech news sites and Apple enthusiasts to parse local news stories, job posts and product announcements for hints about the facility’s design and how Apple might use it. See the Apple Data Center FAQ for a summary of what’s known, as well as a few of the more interesting theories.

You might things couldn’t get any better for the data center corridor in western North Carolina. But they almost did. This past summer a site in Cleveland County was a finalist in a site search by Microsoft, which eventually chose to build a $499 million data center in Boydton, Virginia.

Big Wins Put Region on the Map
Despite that near miss, North Carolina officials have plenty to cheer about, and believe this is just the beginning of a major data center cluster. “Now you’ve got three of the most recognized technology companies in the world here,” said Scott Millar, the director of economic development for Catawba County. “I think it really establishes the corridor. With these companies here, any company doing a data center site search will certainly want to consider this area.”

North Carolina has always had data centers in the Raleigh/Durham area, which is home to Research Triangle Park and data centers for companies including IBM, NetApp, Ralph Lauren, Peak 10, Hosted Solutions and DataChambers.

But things were far quieter in the western part of the state. The region was once a thriving area for textile mills. Many of these mills have departed or closed, leaving behind industrial-strength power and water infrastructure that’s ideally suited for data center development. Duke Energy’s power rates are competitive, with industrial electricity rates at about 5 cents per kilowatt hour.  State and local governments have been generous with offers of tax incentives, which have been a key factor in winning major deals. Here’s a recap:

• In early 2007 Google announced plans to build a $600 million data center in Lenoir, a town of 17,000 residents in Caldwell County.
• In 2009 Apple chose the small town of Maiden (population 3,300) in Catawba County for a $1 billion data center campus.
• On Nov. 11, Facebook unveiled plans to invest $450 million in a new data center facility in Forest City (pop. 7,500) in Rutherford County.
• On Monday, Wipro Infocrossing confirmed plans to build a $75 million data center in Kings Mountain in Cleveland County, which has about 10,000 residents.

Developers marketing properties in Cleveland, Catawba, Caldwell  and Rutherford counties say they’re seeing continuing interest from data center site location consultants and end users.

‘Tremendous Activity’
“We’ve had tremendous activity,” said Pete Marin, the President of developer T5 Partners. “There’s a large number of big projects. We’re seeing requirements from 5 megawatts to 70 megawatts.”

T5 is a data center development company led by former data center specialists with The Staubach Company. The company is focusing on North Carolina, and marketing multiple sites for major end users. T5 is currently building a second data center at its Kings Mountain campus (where Wipro leased its first building) and also has a site in Maiden that has attracted interest. Five 9s Digital is also marketing multiple sites in the region, as are county officials.

Catawba County created DataCemterSites.com to market to the data center sector. Millar began targeting his economic development efforts to the data center industry five years ago, attending industry conferences and hosting an annual Data Center Information Exchange event for data center site selection specialists. The first event five years ago attracted eight consultants. By this year, the event had grown to 50 participants.

The success of western North Carolina demonstrates the evolution of the data center marketplace, where major facilities were historically clustered in bandwidth hubs like northern Virginia and Silicon Valley.

“There will be new markets that emerge,” said Marin. “These 50 megawatt requirements will forge the new frontier.”

Infocrossing will develop its data center in Kings Mountain in a 215,000 square foot shell building that was previously used by Chris-Craft Inc.  to manufacture power boats.  T5 Partners purchased the property earlier this year, and is marketing the campus as T5@KingsMountain. The Infocrossing lease has been noted by some North Carolina media outlets, but T5 has declined comment.

“Google, Apple, Facebook and now Wipro. North Carolina continues to be a prime location for growing and expanding global technology companies,” said North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue.  “Technology leaders recognize that we have a talented workforce, comprehensive infrastructure and a low cost of doing business – a winning formula that has led them to expand operations and make investments to North Carolina.”

Wipro selected North Carolina after an extensive search using the codename “Project Blue Ridge.” Wipro plans to build out 80,000 square feet of raised floor in the Kings Mountain site, and create 17 jobs.

“At Wipro Infocrossing, we are always looking for ways to increase the value we deliver to our customers,” said Sameer Kishore, President of Wipro Infocrossing. “Our vision for our Cleveland County site is to not only increase our data center footprint, but build a facility that brings the best infrastructure technology to our clients,”stated Sameer Kishore, President of Wipro Infocrossing.  “We look forward to becoming a part of the Cleveland County community and tapping into its talented pool of technology experts to build our state-of-the art data center,” continued Mr. Kishore.

Wipro plans to construct the data center to meet the Uptime Institute’s requirements for a Tier III facility and says it will pursue LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certification as a sustainable building.

T5 Partners is already moving ahead on the design and construction of a “powered data shell” of at least 150,000 square feet, with the potential for expansion to as much as 480,000 square feet. The T5@KingsMountain campus includes more than 260 acres of land, with 120 megawatts of power available from Duke Energy at prices of about 4 cents per kilowatt hour.

Wipro, an outsourcing specialist based in India, is eyeing a 215,000-square-foot building in Kings Mountain, which was most recently home of a manufacturing operation for Chris-Craft boats. Meanwhile, Juniper Networks has looked at a 141,000-square-foot former Carolina Mills building in Maiden for a data center, the journal said. Both sites are being developed by T5 Partners.

The projects would continue the strong gains for North Carolina, which has become a magnet for new data centers. The area spanning Caldwell and Catawba counties has been dubbed the Google-Apple Corridor after the two leading tech titans set up data centers in the region – Google in Lenoir, and Apple in Maiden. T5 has been focusing its efforts in the area, and Five 9s Digital recently began marketing sites in the region as well.

Microsoft is also reportedly considering a site in Mebane, North Carolina for a new data center project, while American Express is said to be planning a project near Greensboro. The North Carolina state Senate recently passed updated legislation that would beef up the state’s incentives for data centers. The measure is awaiting action in the state assembly.

A design for one of the sites being developed by Five 9s Digital in Catawba County, North Carolina.

North Carolina’s profile as a destination for data center development has been boosted by the arrival of Google and Apple. But the state’s favorable climate is nothing new to the team at Five 9s Digital, a new data center company with deep roots in the Charlotte market.

Five 9s Digital is a new company headed by Doug Hollidge, who previously helped develop a number of Charlotte’s leading telecom and hosting centers with Pinnacle Properties. Five 9s is marketing six sites in western North Carolina for data center development, and seeking opportunities to acquire existing data centers with tenants for sale/leaseback deals.

Sites Near Apple iDataCenter
Several of the company’s development properties are in Catawba County on land near the new Apple data center in Maiden, N.C. One of the sites was actually used by Apple to test some of its data center equipment bound for the Maiden facility.

Hollidge says the arrival of Apple and a Google data center in Lenoir in 2007 have boosted interest in the region. “The high-profile projects have certainly raised awareness,” said Hollidge, adding that their site location decisions simply brought to light the existing advantages of the area.

“In North Carolina you have an attractive infrastructure in place on multiple levels,” said Hollidge, who said the region’s many textile and manufacturing plants required significant power capacity, as well as the water and sewer infrastructure essential to large-scale data centers.

Incentives Play A Role
Then there are the incentives, which served as major carrots in attracting Apple and Google. “The state of North Carolina has identified data centers as an attractive sector,” said Hollidge, who also noted the “very attractive” incentives on sales and use taxes on equipment.

Five 9s Digital’s current property portfolio features a diverse mix of sites offering options from 48,000 to 700,000 square feet of development space. The upper end is represented by an 84-acre Burke County property that Five 9s is positioning as a data center campus.

Acquisitions and Sale-Leasebacks
Hollidge also sees opportunity in the market for sale-leaseback deals, A sale-leaseback option typically involves a property owner selling their building to a second party, while agreeing to continue to lease space in the building. The transaction generates cash for the former owner (now the tenant), and provides the new owner steady rent from the lease.

“Sale-leasebacks create an opportunity for a company to raise capital,” said Hollidge. “They can control the asset by signing a long-term lease. There are also some owners of these facilities that are not in the data center world. We can come in with our knowledge base and help tenants in those properties that may need to expand.”