The 10 Best Cities for a Data Center

By Michelle Savage

June 2, 2008 — (Page 1 of 4)
The most expensive city in which to run a data center is, not surprisingly, New York. The cheapest is, not surprisingly, Sioux Falls, S.D.

The annual operating cost of running a 125,000-square-foot data center with 75 employees in New York is US$28.1 million, while in Sioux Falls, it’s $11.2 million, according to a May study by the Boyd Company, a corporate site selection firm.

The Boyd Company’s 2008 report, “Banking and Financial Services: A Comparative Cost Analysis for Information Assurance Operations,” compared the cost of operating data centers in 45 U.S. cities, based on key site selection factors for establishing new, free-standing and highly secure corporate data centers.

The company’s top site selections generally favored smaller-market, lower-risk locations in the mid-continent region, allowing for centralized and shorter disaster-recovery fly-ins from either coast and greater insulation from a variety of threats, such as earthquakes on the West Coast, ice storms in the Northeast and terrorist threats in major metropolitan areas. Additional site selection criteria included strong telecommunications infrastructure, large pools of workers with specialized computer security skills, affordable land acquisition costs, competitive energy costs and other local and state business climate considerations.

Forrester Research analysts Stephanie Balaouras and Galen Schreck, in a recent report titled “Checklist For Data Center Site Selection,” seemed to echo Boyd’s findings, saying that selecting a data center site provides opportunities for companies to ensure that production and recovery sites are appropriately distanced from each other, and located in low-risk geographic regions with access to cheap power and labor costs.

“Data centers are vast consumers of electric power, so we look at cities that have competitive power rates,” said Boyd Company president John Boyd. “For example, one of our clients is [insurance provider] Progressive, whose new moderate-sized data center in Colorado Springs uses the equivalent of 1,400 homes. When you’re using this much power, it is important to select cities with dependable and low-cost power rates.”

The Top 10
According to the Boyd study, the top 10 cities for data center operations are:

Sioux Falls, S.D.
Huntsville, Ala.
Bloomington, Ind.
Rolla, Mo.
Council Bluffs, Iowa
Tulsa, Okla.
Ames, Iowa
San Antonio, Texas
Omaha, Neb.
Albuquerque, N.M.

Boyd’s top-ranked city, Sioux Falls, had the distinction of being the only U.S. city to have the National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education accreditation, a program that is jointly sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security in support of President George W. Bush’s National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. The goal of the program is to reduce vulnerability in the national information infrastructure by promoting higher education in information assurance (IA), and producing a growing number of professionals with IA expertise in various disciplines.

Related Search Term(s): Data centers, IT infrastructure, power, security

Pages 1 2 3 4

Share this link: https://sptechweb.com/link/32272

What's Driving the Next-Generation Data Center? The push to improve energy efficiency is driving new approaches to IT equipment architecture and best practices. Improvements in technology allow companies to apply techniques and standards they once only dreamed of.

LinuxWorld Shares Stage With Data Centers This week, in San Francisco, LinuxWorld and the Next Generation Data Center conference shared the same space. Here is a collection of announcements and presentations from both.

CA Adds Data Loss Prevention With Orchestria Purchase CA executives said Orchestria’s data loss prevention technology complements the company’s server protection capabilities and prevents data breaches. This is the third security-related acquisition in the past six months for CA.

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment
Preview

The 10 Best Cities for a Data Center

By Michelle Savage

Related Articles

Add comment