Microsoft's Quincy campus is not only the heart of its data center strategy, it shows how the data center industry at large will evolve thanks to thinking around designing for cloud
Internet Pioneer Vint Cerf Explains IPv6 Launch Day – Happy IPv6 Launch Day, everyone! And what does that mean? Who better to explain this than Vint Cerf, a “founding father” of the Internet and now Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. When the Internet launched operationally in 1983, Cerf recalls, no one dreamed that there might one day be billions of devices and users trying to get online.
East Wenatchee is a long way from Wall Street. But the small town in central Washington state serves as the unlikely home for a data center for one of the major players in the financial industry. The financial services firm Blackrock operates a new data center at a mission critical campus operated by Sabey Corp. Blackrock is the world’s largest asset management firm, overseeing more than $3.5 trillion in funds for its clients, which include pension funds and insurance companies. The company has also emerged as a leader in the development of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), investments that track indices of stocks or bonds. ETFs allow investors many of the advantages of mutual funds, but with a lower fee structure.
Washington state is poised to restore data center tax incentives that sparked a building boom in the state in 2010, and could help the state compete more effectively with Oregon for future projects. Last week the Washington state legislature passed sales and use tax exemptions for data centers built in rural counties, and Gov. Chris Gregoire is expected to sign the bill into law. Once it is signed, the bill will restore tax incentives that jump-started data center construction in Quincy, a small town in Grant County that is home to a cluster of major data centers for companies like Microsoft and Yahoo.
Private equity firm Halyard Capital has acquired two service providers in the Pacific northwest to create Digital Fortress, a new colocation company. Digital Fortress, which will be headquartered in Seattle, consists of the merged operations of digital.forest and Fortress Colocation Services. The new company has also leased space in a downtown Seattle building for additional colocation space. Halyard Capital has experience in the data center sector as an investor in Inflow, a managed hosting provider that targeted second-tier markets and was eventually sold to SunGard. Halyard says Digital Fortress will serve as “a platform for consolidating the highly fragmented data center marketplace in the Pacific Northwest.”
