Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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Abandoned pepboys stores don't usually have very good fiber connectivity. Backblaze and similar hosting/storage companies move enough traffic that they need to be topologically close to major IX points.

If all you want is cheap commercial real estate with cheap dollars per square foot figures, there are plenty of economically depressed areas within the United States that you could put things. Those areas usually have very poor fibre connectivity, fibre diversity, and choice of carriers.

I have previously explained this to a number of people who asked me, basically, why don't all of these gigantic abandoned shopping malls get converted into Data center space? Two reasons: poor connectivity, and nowhere near enough electrical grid feed capacity (as proper three phase service) in terms of watts per square foot. Bulldozing empty land in Quincy and putting up a tilt-up concrete on slab dedicated purpose datacenter structure is much less costly than extensively retrofitting abandoned, 30, 40, 50 year old commercial real estate.

> Abandoned pepboys stores don't usually have very good fiber connectivity. Backblaze and similar hosting/storage companies move enough traffic that they need to be topologically close to major IX points.

Not stores. Data centers.

It is typically cheaper to get long distance fiber links than metro fiber and midsize data centers do not consume that much power, power which is plentiful outside the major metros, especially in the old manufacturing areas.

The real reason why companies do not go there is because it is not sexy and non-sexy places do not get "ninja" employees that would be passing brain teasers on a whiteboard.

> Bulldozing empty land in Quincy and putting up a tilt-up concrete on slab dedicated purpose datacenter structure is much less costly than extensively retrofitting abandoned, 30, 40, 50 year old commercial real estate.

If you are doing it in a major metro then unless you get a big fat tax break your real estate taxes are going to kill you.

I didn't expect to see Pep Boys as an example. Do/did they have their own data centers?

I toured three in the late 2000 about 20-25 minutes away from Philadelphia in different directions. I was told if we wanted to go further away there were dozens.

There's its own market for 15-30k sq/feet built out data processing facilities. It is something that compete with Equinix? Not at all, but it is definitely competitive with 3rd tier colos at the major carrier hotels at a fraction of the cost.

> Not stores. Data centers.

Honestly, it doesn't make much difference. Datacenters built for random corporations often only have connectivity to the local ILEC or MSO which is going to get you pretty poor pricing.

All of them are on net and all of them have fiber already to the premises. Most of them have not just local loops but termination point for long distance carriers.

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