In cities ranging from St. Louis to Boston to London, here’s a new trend these days in data center design: Using existing buildings in urban downtowns. The facilities – ranging from empty department stores to abandoned tanning factories – house modern data centers, developed and built by the companies themselves or by providers who lease the space to clients.
Such facilities offer a number of advantages over using more modern buildings for data centers, as well as over building new ones.
The first advantage is a matter of convenience and lifestyle. Members of what urban studies theorist Richard Florida calls “the creative class” (PDF) – especially young, single people – are more likely to want to live and work in urban downtowns rather than in the suburbs, due to the cities’ “coolness factor” and proximity to amenities such as restaurants and cultural activities.
Google, in particular – which has made a corporate commitment to lowering the amount of energy its data centers require – is siting a number of its data centers and office facilities in renovated older buildings.
For example, the company recently invested 200 million Euros on developing a data center in Hamina, Finland, in an old paper mill, which is expected to employ about 50 people. “Hamina has the right combination of energy infrastructure, developable land and available workforce for the data center,” the company said in a website devoted to the proposed data center. Paper mills have industrial-grade infrastructure such as space, power (as much as 1,000 megawatts – plus wind power plants), and water – and yet, at the same time, modern infrastructure such as fiber-optic networks. (And, reportedly – like any good Finnish company – a sauna, which Google employees now enjoy.)
About a year ago, Google decided to move its Ontario office to what had been an old tannery, renovated partly by a $26 million grant from the Canadian provincial government. In addition, in December 2010, Google announced it was buying 111 Eighth Avenue, a former Port Authority building in New York City. It serves as the company's North American advertising sales headquarters, its largest engineering center outside of California, and an engineering R&D center. The 15-story, 3 million sq. ft. building, which covers an entire city block, has its own subway stop, and is also located on one of the main fiber optic hubs in New York City.
Architecture, Historic Preservation
After the urban renewal debacle of the 1960s that saw many cities tear down their historic downtowns, re-using older buildings as data centers shows a respect for historic preservation and a renewed interest in the vintage buildings we still have. Century-old buildings often display a craftsmanship that is missing in buildings today, with appealing features such as 20-foot ceilings and cityscape views. Google’s New York facility, for example, was built in 1932 at the height of the Art Deco period.
One pioneer in data center reuse is Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. In the late 1970s, looking for a site for its new computer center, the university faced a student outcry at its proposal to tear down what was, at that time, an almost 50-year-old chapel that also used to house the school’s library. Instead, in 1979, the school added a glass and steel mezzanine inside the walls of the chapel to help house the Alan M. Voorhees Computing Center, constructed at a cost of $3.4 million.
Infrastructure
In a time when it can be difficult to get sufficient power to run a data center, downtowns can be plentifully supplied. In St. Louis, for example, the city’s power grid remains from the time when downtown was dominated by large warehouse and industrial companies. It has excess capacity, according to an article in the New York Times earlier this year. St. Louis, in particular, is attractive because of the low cost of power in that city and state in general – as much as 41% below the national average, the article went on to say. And Google’s New York facility has up to 24 megawatts of emergency power in the event of a blackout.
Older buildings can offer a variety of options for heating and cooling as well. RPI’s Voorhees Computer Center used the heat from the computer itself to heat the building, while network provider Level III Communications, which renovated a former Montgomery Ward warehouse in downtown Chicago, uses large fans and shutters in the winter to use the ambient air (properly dehumidified and filtered) to help cool the building, says account director Scott Hardy.
In addition, the building’s 20-foot ceilings make it easier to keep the equipment cool. “In a data center, one of the biggest problems you have is heat,” Hardy says. “A higher ceiling means heat goes all the way up to the roof rather than coming down and heating up your equipment. It’s more efficient and gives you a price break.”
Amazon bought a similar facility – a former grocery warehouse in Dublin – earlier this year after it had sat vacant for two years. No wonder – it’s 240,000 square feet. The company intends to build a data center for its cloud service.
The Boston area has several such facilities, including one in a former Jordan Marsh department store and one in a former Filene’s Basement warehouse. The first facility, for example, now known as One Summer Street and operated by the Markley Group, has 40 MW of power and eight redundant fiber entrances.
And if you look beyond traditional buildings, the sky’s the limit – or, perhaps, the underground’s the limit. The Montgomery Westland data center campus, near Houston, “was created to be a self-contained refuge by people obsessed with security and operational independence,” according to its website. That’s one way to put it. It was a privately owned bomb shelter, built by a nephew of Madam Chiang Kai-shek in the 1980s.
“You’re not going to find that kind of structure anywhere unless it’s a government nuclear bomb shelter – which is basically what this is,” says CEO Jymme Gomez, who bought the property and invested $30 million into making it a Tier III data center, 55 feet underground. “You can’t build this.” Several other data centers – including that of records management vendor Iron Mountain – are built in former bunkers and even underground mines.
“Green” Building
Increasingly, companies like to be seen as “green,” or environmentally responsible, looking at building standards such as Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) that are intended to encourage developers to build in a more sustainable fashion. However, using an existing building – especially if it keeps an older building from being torn down – is often even more sustainable than that.
“It is generally accepted that remodeling is ‘greener’ than building new, due to lower resource requirements, which results in a lower total embodied energy,” says Leif Elgethun, PE and a LEED accredited professional. Elgethun is a managing member for E- Newables, a Boise, Idaho-based consultancy in renewable energy and energy efficiency, and vice chair of the Idaho chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council. “All LEED categories have points for reusing materials, and the LEED standards that deal with renovations specifically have points for the percentage of the building that doesn't get replaced.”
Compelling Financial Incentives
Many older cities that suffered from flights to the suburbs are finding themselves with empty, crime-ridden downtowns and a lack of jobs, meaning they’re willing to offer tax breaks and other incentives to change that. “You can get a lot of benefits by going into an old building, which you wouldn’t get by knocking one down and clearing out the space,” Hardy says.
Last year, for example, the Missouri House of Representatives passed a bill granting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax exemptions to companies wishing to locate data centers in the state (which includes St. Louis). The bill failed, but it’s an indication of how governments are thinking.
Other areas are ripe for the opportunity as well – and looking at it hard. “In Las Vegas, my city of residence, the unemployment rate is at a whopping 14.9%, and the landscape is littered with abandoned supermarket and department store sites,” wrote Derrick Harris of GigaOM in a blog posting entitled Can Data Centers Help Cure Urban Decay? “Where those stores anchored shopping centers, the neighboring businesses are moving out or going out of business. We have a 24-hour workforce, limitless solar energy and an economy desperately in need of diversification — why not convert some of our large abandoned space into data center sites?”
Why not, indeed?
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