November 22, 2007
By Rocky Ahmann, President of InDallas.net
There's roughly 20 data centers in Dallas. As of today, there's 3
data centers that we have identified in Fort Worth. So what are the
reason's for this huge disparity?
For starters, the city of Fort Worth is not enticing data centers to
come to the city. The city wants to improve air quality and data
centers are huge offenders with the amount of power they consume. In
a Fort Worth Chamber of commerce meeting in 2005, we heard that the
chamber had voted against offering tax incentives to entice some
prospective companies from bringing their data centers to Fort Worth.
There were some high dollar data centers in Fort Worth from the late
1990s that went under when the dot com bubble burst. Those buildings
were taken over by the city and surprisingly converted into storage
and office areas. This meant millions of dollars of infrastructure
was ripped out and thrown away.
Another reason for the lack of data centers in Fort Worth is the lack
of demand for technology related companies in Fort Worth. There's
only a handful of web designers in the city which is generally a
pretty good pulse of the technology market for a city.
In the opinion of InDallas.net founder Rocky Ahmann, Fort Worth is a
prime location for a data center for the following reasons. Geographically downtown Fort Worth is 32 miles away from
downtown Dallas. Sarbanes Oxley dictates that publicly held
companies's back up facilities have to be 30 miles away from their
primary facilities. That would make Fort Worth a prime destination
for a back up facility for all of those Dallas data centers where you
could have one administrator be able to manage both facilities.
In addition, there's a long standing unspoken rivalry between Dallas
and Fort Worth. It is suprising that all of those Fort Worth oil
companies are sending their data center dollars east on Interstate
30. Plus that means that their administrators, assuming that they
are in Fort Worth, are a 30 minute drive time away from their servers
in the event of an emergency.
In addition, downtown Fort Worth has the fiber and power
infrastructure in place to support a successful data center. Don't
be surprised if the new data center in Fort Worth is sold out by this
time next year. |
