The data center is a curse, not a blessing. There could be homes for 1000 people at this site, plus the Macy’s, plus the data center.
Macy’s is closing 150 stores nationwide. Downtown Boston’s may survive, thanks to the data center upstairs. - The Boston Globe
A 1990s real estate deal helped make the downtown block more about computing power than clothing sales.www.bostonglobe.com
Data Centers (from Downtown/Financial district infill)
- Thread starter Jeremi
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Youre not colocating residential with a major critical data center. Complicated cooling, security, and safety concerns (fire primarily).
You can easily split the site in two. It’s huge.
Facts are stubborn things. The massive site is already split in three--Markley data center on top right-hand, Hyatt/LCC on the bottom half left-hand, with the very stark property line between Markley and the other owners/uses slicing diagonally through it.
You'll notice the Hyatt/LCC rooftop has a modest number of mechanicals--a widely dispersed sprinkling--whereas PRACTICALLY EVERY SQUARE INCH OF THE MARKLEY DATA CENTER ROOFTOP IS COMPLETELY FILLED WITH MECHANICALS.
Think about what that implies about what's going on there--the massive quantity of terabytes of sensitive data stored there, giving off insane amounts of heat waste every day, needing to be kept cooled at optimum temperatures 24/7/365 or else the unthinkable. Think about the tens of millions of dollars of infrastructure poured into maintaining that; think of the hundreds of billions of dollars of net valuation those companies have riding on the maintenance of that data. Think about how incredibly lucrative the status quo is.
As laudable as your goal for mixed-use diversification at the site is, it's so wildly delusional and divorced from an infinitude of practical realities--financial, sociopolitical, and above all, engineering--as to be laughable.
No. This is just a building constructed without dedicated mechanical floors. The fan coil units, chillers, condensers went on the roof as a matter of convenience, but nothing requires them to be there. If a data center is so critical, it could be built on a much smaller footprint in a building actually designed and suited for it, which this one is not.
As someone with a professional cert in data center and telco design - This absolutely is a building designed for it, and no you cannot build it smaller. Everything about a data center is managing heat - servers can only be so close together because of the heat they generate, so you have spaced hot and cold aisles to allow convection to work. Server racks are spaced the way they are, and take up the space they take up, because the closer they are the localized heat is too much to handle - air is pretty bad as a conductor.
That site is also 1) New England's only carrier hotel, 2) a tier 4 facility (meaning ≥99.995% availability - which translates into less than 15 minutes down every 5 years), and 3) is designed for up to 40MW of power (It currently operates at 30MW) - all of which is backed up by onsite generators. It has something like 8 separate 13.8kV feeds from multiple substations, along different routings. That building has redundant everything - I believe it has 2N everything except cooling, which is N+1, simply because they don't have the space for it. 30MW of electricity going into servers generates enough heat to boil a thousand gallons of water every hour. The reality is that you can only put so much heat back into the air, and you need every inch of exposed area possible to accomplish that - and account for the additional needs of generators, some of which will be momentum UPSs, but the rest will be diesel fueled. Side venting through a mechanical floor does not move enough air. And once you get tall, you run into the problem of weight. Unless you can find a use for that waste heat, it's a nonstarter. I'm aware of some concepts, but none that have been built anywhere to my knowledge.
The fact is, that facility predates 9/11. Modern security requirements for a building like this with critical uptime look more like those for a federal agency headquarters - setbacks, fences and guards, and typically in no event do they include mixed use facilities. I can think of 2 in the US, This Macy's, and the former Verizon Building in NYC, where while the data center occupies the lower 14 floors, it has approximately a quarter of the capacity of 1 Summer. Large floor plates are a more efficient use of space for data centers because of thermodynamics and the redundancies involved - it's why the hyperscalers build million square foot campuses.
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Thanks so much for all that info! Please, seriously, try and shoehorn your datacenter knowledge into every thread in this forum. If people say it's off topic, I'll defend you.
That's wild that this is the only carrier hotel in New England. Out of curiosity, do you know where else in the region would even work? I would have thought places like the data centers on Inner Belt Road would have the kind of power/fiber redundancy for something like this.
Bruins11363
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The appropriate response would have been to say: "wow, thanks for the explanation. I guess I was wrong". But it's pretty hard to do that these days I get it
lol in the very example she gave the colocation is underneath 20 stories of offices
Bruins11363
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I think you don't have a full grasp on how real estate and development works. See if you can figure out how to move the pre-2000 data center to a better location in a way that pencils for any investor...
This is, again, why a land value tax would make low value uses like “data center” move to low cost places.
Does a data center need to be centralized in a major downtown? Why couldn't they build a dedicated one in the South Boston wasteland somewhere, like maybe the upcoming Gillette site, or on the Dot parcels or something? There's still plenty of space to build a monstrous land-scraper and then get taller/denser housing in DTX. Obviously I don't know the logistics of moving a data center, but don't understand why it HAS to be where it is now.
Because a real estate guy made a savvy move 30 years ago, and that’s why.
Bruins11363
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I don't disagree that this land could be best served in another capacity. But there are SO many hurdles to move it at this point. I could be wrong, but in addition to all of the points made above, I heard there is fiber that terminates here connected to Europe. I think a more extreme example would be "let's move North Station somewhere else". It's just sort of impractical, and I think we can focus our attention at other sites that would be more practical to redeveloping and adding housing/mixed use (which I am all for!!)
JeffDowntown
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Major co-location data centers need to be locate at NICs -- the major interconnect points of the internet. The fiber core of Boston's internet connectivity is in downtown Boston, basically because that is where the legacy telecom provider was located.
The clients of the co-location center are paying to be directly connected to the fiber backbone.
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No, the largest colocation centers are in the boonies, often near airports where the power isn't a worry. Fiber runs cheap these days.
JeffDowntown
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Fastest connections are still on top of the backbone. Co-location on top of the backbone (at an IXP) is prized by certain sectors who demand low latency, fastest data transfer, and access to the maximum number of ISPs and carriers.
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bigpicture7
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This whole discussion (while quite interesting) is missing the forest from the trees, IMO. Lack of land availability in the urban core is not the main reason for lack of investment in housing inventory. There are dozens of sites within < 0.5 mi. of here that are comparably more available than this one and also not being invested in. Why are we picking on the one that is 100x harder to deal with while lower hanging fruit rots on the vine?