The demand for data centers just isn’t subsiding. And to serve the companies that can’t build their own data centers, there’s there has been a boom in retail co-location space around the world, according to Telegeography. The places in which this boom is happening may surprise you.
While traditional data center locales such as New York and San Francisco are getting new data centers, non-traditional places such as Bangalore, Austin, Texas and Hong Kong are also seeing big increases in data center capacity. Austin, my hometown, saw the largest gain, with a mere two providers –Data Foundry and CyrusOne — adding over a million square feet of raised floor space from 2010 to 2012. The addition of a massive amount of space driven by one or two vendors is a trend of sorts, with Bangalore’s 937,000 new square feet provided almsot entirely by one company — Tulip
The same trends driving the growth of mega data centers by cloud providers and web companies is pushing demand for more co-location space as well. Inside these centers, companies ranging from small web sites to Twitter have servers, while other servers might host a nascent cloud provider or a private cloud. This is certainly the case at the SuperNAP in Las Vegas, which houses a who’s who of customers and plans to expand to more than 2 million square feet.
And for those wondering where to go to find the most colocation facilities, Telegeography provided me a list of the top 5 cities in the world by the amount of square feet.
- New York – 3.53 million gross square feet with 15 percent growth over the past 2 years
- San Francisco Bay area – 3 million gross square feet with 7 percent growth over the past 2 years
- London – 2.65 million square feet with negligible growth over the past 2 years, though 160,000 gross square feet will be launched this quarter and another almost 100,000 square feet will be launched early next year.
- Chicago – 2.14 million gross square feet with negligible growth over the past 2 years
- Washington D.C.- 2 million gross square feet with 8 percent growth over the past 2 years
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