I’ve been in the telecom business for a long time and I have to admit that every once in while I consider a career change. Usually it’s after I’ve been involved in the recovery from an outage caused by one of Fred’s squirrels. Turns out that almost all of our animal damage comes from those furry little nut eaters. I’ve often considered a career in real estate. After all I already have almost as much hair as Donald Trump, what other requirements can there be?
Luckily for me, Level 3 is sort of in the real estate business already. And I thought that perhaps I could try out my real estate marketing skills before I started ordering new business cards. If you think about it, selling data center space is just really selling condos for computers, right? How does this sound?
Cool Space in the San Fran Area is Now Even Cooler
Newly Listed: Place your servers in one of the coolest locations in the San Fran area. Totally new, 10,000 sqft server home, no bedrooms, 1 bath, with concrete floors, high ceilings and access to lots of high-speed bandwidth. Closed-circuit video surveillance and secured access. Standard amenities include: redundant AC and power, high density racks, and lots of space for your family of applications. | |
| Address: San Francisco, CA | |
| Beds: 0 | |
| Baths: 1 | |
| Sqft: 10,000 | |
| Type: Tier III Compliant | |
| Year Built: 2012 | |
| Cooling: Redundant | |
| Power: UPS | |
| Fireplace: No | |
| Virtual Tour: Click here | |
Buy vs. Rent
Ever notice that it’s always a home mortgage company that is promoting buying vs. renting. Typically the math is skewed towards the rising value of a home as an investment, as opposed to the costs of maintenance, taxes and interest. In the data center business, it’s much the same equation, but you have to add in the technology variable. Data center technology is evolving at the pace of Moore’s Law. And the innovation isn’t just restricted to the density of transistors on integrated circuits.
When you consider buying vs. renting for data centers, it’s a question of timing. For example, in our premier elite data centers, we have high power density racks and plenty of space to add horsepower when demand grows. This means that you can ride the technology curve and pack more processing into less space. If you have existing data centers, imagine the cost of upgrading your infrastructure to keep up with the latest innovations. And then consider the fact that next year there will be something even better to deploy.
So why wait? Lease space in our new data center today! Your servers and applications (and customers) will thank you.
About Michael Anderson
