News
Why Washington Works
May 17, 2012
| Finally, some evidence that Washington's cool weather is good for something (besides an excuse to skip that jog): Egis Facility Services president Tom Ripley and Egis Real Estate director of technology services Ed Doyne point out that when it comes to data centers, the more temperate the climate, the better. |
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| We chatted with Ed and Tom post-sesh at our Bisnow Tech Event at SAM. Why put a data center in Washington state? "We have very inexpensive power compared to the East Coast," Tom tells us. "The cool weather makes it a lot easier to operate a data center than in, say, California or Arizona or Georgia," Ed adds. That all sounds logical to us, but Ed and Tom point out that real estate customers don't like investing in spec data centers, especially if they haven't been built yet. "When a real estate customer wants a data center, they want to kick the tires," Tom says. (What did those tires ever do to them?) "They want the space, but they won't buy it in advance," Ed agrees. |
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| Here's Fisher Plaza, one of downtown's most prominent examples of a data center/office building/retail space. Egis built it after surveying a number of tech companies and asking what they wanted. Sure, it was twice the size Fisher wanted, but they hooked in a number of new tenants and ended up saving the company money, Ed says. What's the difference between office buildings and data centers? "Office is sexy," Ed says. But once [a data center] is built, you never have any problems leasing it." It also helps to have an anchor tenant, which allows other tenants to feel better taking the plunge. |
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| Want a cheap(er) data center? Head over the mountains to Quincy, where you can check on your servers and take in a Dave Matthews concert in a single trip. (We borrowed this picture, which shows a neighborhood of data centers in Quincy, from data center aficianado Sabey Corp.) But if you want your techs to be able to hug your servers (and some companies do, Ed assures us), you put them in your office building. Or somewhere close by, like out in Redmond, where there's a good amount of space and plenty of cool air. Ed and Tom tell us they have a project there that's almost ready to go. |
