Most of those sites are urban, though the company is now moving into the suburbs. Stephen Young, an analyst with Ovum, a London-based telecommunications research company, says, It is fundamental that telecom hotels have to be where the fiber and electricity is, and where the businesses are. Regarding the right geographic location, each facility should be sited in an area where direct connection to a high bandwidth network can be easily set up and reliably maintained. Telecom hotels also require a very large and very reliable supply of power, often 100 watts per square foot. And telecom hotels should be located as near to their customers as possible, since developing sufficient trust for customers to outsource their mission critical facilities requires the customer to meet and inspect the facility and perform maintenance on the equipment in an emergency.
Key customers have to be able to send in their IT staff with minimal delay.
The California and New York campuses should break ground by this fall. Each campus will comprise between 150 and 200 acres with the data center space taking up between 2.5 million to 3.7 million square feet. We envision the buildings ranging from 50,000 square feet to 500,000 square feet. We will be prebuilding some cold, dark shells based on market forecasts, and building to suit for some tenants on 20-year leases, says Shadle. Shadle cites a report that 80 percent of data centers are now owned by corporations, but that 80 percent of those are thinking of outsourcing data hosting over the next three years.