Going inside a modern data center is a chance to remember that our data-intensive online lives and businesses still require lots of hardware, even though we may see and touch less of it. The server racks, conduits, nests of wire and cable, “meet me” rooms, and the heavy power, cooling, and security infrastructure supporting it all are the physical manifestation of the private and public clouds and virtual marketplaces where life and business take place today.
In downtown Seattle, international data center operator Equinix (NASDAQ: [[ticker:EQIX]]) is opening the first phase of its SE3 multi-tenant datacenter in a converted Clise Properties parking garage, adjacent to the Pacific Northwest’s premier telecommunications hub, the Westin Building, where Equinix has its SE2 datacenter. It is a strategic location on a local and global scale, given Seattle’s role as a cloud computing hub and a main terminal for the growing volume of Internet traffic between North America and the Asia-Pacific region.
The 51,000-square-foot, $60 million project creates space for about 1,000 server cabinets, with direct connection to major telecom providers and the Seattle Internet Exchange.
“We actually consider this one of our strengths at Equinix—the ability to work at a downtown location and figure out how to find space near that, and then be able to take advantage of what’s an old parking structure that was under-used, and put a data center on top of it,” says Mark Adams, chief development officer of the Redwood City, CA-based company.
