i/o Data Centers Readies Massive NJ Modular Site

io-nj-web-jpg

An aerial view of the huge new i/o New Jersey data center, which previously served as a newspaper printing plant for The New York Times.

i/o Data Centers is transforming a former New York Times printing plant in New Jersey into the world's largest modular data center, the company said today. The 830,000 square foot building in Edison, N.J. will become the East Coast hub for Phoenix-based i/o Data Centers, which is converting the building into a facility to house data center capacity in customized containers.

The huge building is adjacent to Exit 10 of the New Jersey Turnpike, providing easy highway access for the colocation provider to roll in its i/o Anywhere product, a family of modular data center components that are being built in the company's Phoenix factory and can be transported to New Jersey via truck.  i/o Data Centers said "several enterprise customers" had already purchased capacity at the Edison site.

The new facility provides the latest example of the new digital economy filling the industrial footprint left behind by is predecessors from the world of print. The Edison site opened in 1992 as a state-of-the-art newspaper printing plant, but was closed in 2008 when the Times reduced the size of its print product and consolidated its printing operations in Queens. Google is currently building a major data center in Finland in a newsprint paper mill.

i/o New Jersey is located next to a large power switching station, and has in-place fiber optic connectivity from two of the largest IP backbones in the world.

The New Jersey facility is part of a broader strategy to make i/o Data Centers a national provider of colocation and data center services. The company currently operates two data centers in the Phoenix market – a 125,000 square foot site in Scottsdale and i/o Phoenix, which at 538,000 square feet is among the world’s largest data centers.

"“i/o now controls two of the largest data centers in the world and has the ability to deliver Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) across the entire continent of North America," said George D. Slessman, CEO of i/o. "We can bring a data center of the magnitude of i/o New Jersey online immediately because of our i/o Anywhere modular data center technology.”

We'll have more coverage of this project tomorrow.