Data Center Site Selection: Where to Next?

Our theme this May was site selection. From electricity costs and network infrastructure to the available pool of skilled workforce, data center site selection is one of the most complicated and important business decisions a company makes. Data center location affects everything from the cost of doing business and overall company agility to the quality of user experience. And, like every other aspect of the data center business, where companies choose to put their critical IT infrastructure and why is changing because of … you guessed it: the Cloud. This month, we examined these trends more closely, and here are the results all in one place:

How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last? - US data center REITs reported record leasing for the year’s first quarter, attributing their success primarily to a digital land grab by public cloud giants, who are racing to expand capacity.

Data Center Market Spotlight: Northern Virginia - Of all North American data center markets, Northern Virginia has been the most consistently active one, due in large part to its history.

Data Center Market Spotlight: New Jersey - The Garden State of course has a lot more to offer than gangsters, trashy reality TV, and flamboyant politicians, and one of those things is a sizable data center industry that’s been recently undergoing some changes.

Vantage to Add 21MW in Supply-Starved Silicon Valley Data Center Market - Here is some good news for Bay Area technology firms: One of the tightest data center markets in North America is going to have more product available.

EdgeConneX Brings the Edge of Amazon’s Cloud to Portland - If the edge of the internet is in thedata center that’s closest to you where Netflix and YouTube cache their most popular content, the edge of the enterprise cloud is the data center closest to you where your cloud provider’s infrastructure is.

What Cloud and AI Do and Don’t Mean for Google’s Data Center Strategy - One of Google’s big missions this year has been to prove to the world that it is a serious player in the cloud services market. Hiring VMware founder Diane Greene was one of the biggest steps in that direction. The other was Google’s commitment to make a sizable investment in expanding the data center infrastructure necessary to support a global cloud business. The company said in March it would add cloud data centers in 10 new locations around the world before the end of next year.

CyrusOne Plans Huge Expansion at CME Data Center Campus in Chicago - Seeing an influx of inquiries from financial services firms about colocation at the CME Group data center outside of Chicago CyrusOne acquired in a sale-leaseback transaction announced in March, the data center provider is planning to build a 500,000-square foot building on the property to expand capacity.