Choosing a data center – why we’re located where we are

Choosing which datacenter to place your servers in is a fundamentally important decision to safeguard your customers business along with your own.  Why am I writing this? Because I am alarmed at the continual poor choice of datacenter by many of our competitors.

Our two main locations are in Atlanta and Clifton, NJ (a few miles outside NYC). Why here?

• No natural disasters. Atlanta can get windy and New Jersey can get cold but these are not in tornado alleys or worse, in earthquate hot spots. (Our Atlanta facility has a steel/tungsten reinforced roof BTW).
• Availability of power and bandwidth. Atlanta has some of the cheapest and most reliable power in the country due to coal/nuclear. It is also very well connected and the best connected city to South America where many rapidly growing markets have heavy IT demands. Clifton is just miles outside New York City so while power is a litle more expensive, it is the most connected city in Northern America with connections across the continental United States as well as one of the main termination points for European bandwidth.
• Availability of skilled labor. There are many other “safe” places to locate datacenters in the US. Typically these are in southern states where a shortage of IT graduates becomes an increasing worry. Atlanta has Georgia Tech, and New York has more colleges and universities than we’d like to even guess.

We still shake our heads in disbelief when some of our major competitors continually choose LA for their datacenters. LA’s a great city. Nice beaches. Too much traffic. But worst of all, when The Big One hits then the telecoms infrastructure goes down. Having studied Geography at college, I know a good amount about earthquakes. And quite simply, one will devastate the IT infrastructure in LA. Well engineered buildings will remain upright due to their dampeners and “suspension” type foundations. But the building is going to shake. Racks will fall over, servers will fall out of racks. This will trip power, may even cause fires and set off fire surpression systems. Fiber will be ripped out from the street. And emergency services are going to respond to human emergencies before they even consider checking a datacenter out.

Not only this, LA is short on power. Just last week with the fires raging, brownouts happened. Obviously, datacenters cannot afford to go offline during a brownout so they run on their generators. Generators generally run diesel and have a finite supply. What happens to that finite supply if you need a redelivery in an emergency? The lights turn off….

I’m sorry to rant on this subject. I guess it scares me that so many people continue to risk their business and livelihoods in a LA datacenter that is at risk. You have been warned!