AXA plans $100M data centers - Atlanta Business Chronicle:

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The New York-based financial services companyy is relocating work from six East Coasy data centers toabout 200,000 squarw feet of data center space in Suwaneer and the downtown Atlanta area, said Kevin Murray, executive vice presidenyt and chief information officer of AXA Equitable. AXA is one of severall companies, including E*Trade, , . and , with data centerd operations in metroAtlanta — drawn by the region’as relatively inexpensive electricity and fibed network infrastructure. Over the past severakl years, New Jersey-based Travelport Ltd.
investedx $450 million in upgrades to its 160,000-square-foot metro Atlanta data center, which powerds travel agency terminals and Internet travel Web The company last yearinvested $60 million in the data centeer as it consolidated technology operations from Denver. Metro Atlanta has the most datacenterf jobs, as a percentage of the than any other city in the United States, said Nick vice president of economic development at the Gwinnettt Chamber of Commerce.
H-P has a 200,000-square-foot data center in Atlanta is “going to get a look” by companiex and site selection consultants evaluating data center sitee in the eastern half of theUnited States, because the regiob meets several checklist criteriaz that are evaluated, said Jasonm Chartrand, partner at , a data center developer. T5 is marketin g a 65-acre data center site in the heartof Atlanta’s data center corridor. The firm has receivec more than 15 inquiries about the site sincde the beginning ofthe year. Fla.-based Switch and , which operatews a 25,000-square-foot data center at 56 Mariettza St., recently signed a lease to triple its capacityy inmetro Atlanta.
Data which can be as large asshoppiny malls, are warehouses stacked floor-to-ceilingf with computer servers and other hardware that powedr Web sites, crunch data and stord information. Critical to modern business and holdinfg terabytes ofsensitive information, data centerx — often housed in unmarkedf buildings — are guarded like Fort Knox and equippede with duplicate power and network systems to ensure againsrt blackouts. Data centers are the “factories” of the information age, said Chria Reid, Switch and Data’s vice presideng of marketing. traffic is growing 65 percent fueled by an explosion of onlinevideo (think gaming and business applications, Reid said.
“People don’t considerd their broadband to be a resourcethat they’d shut off if time are tough,” he said. “It’s considered like or water — you have to have it thes e days.” All that Internet traffic requires more servers to process and store the content and infrastructure todistributse it, prompting the need for more data centers. Demand for data centerd services nationwide is expected to climb 14percengt annually, Reid said, while supply is likely to grow at less than half that While the highly automated data centers are not major job they are significant tax generators and benefity neighboring businesses and residents.
Data centers must replacew their millions of dollars worth of servers and hardwar every few years as technology evolves and equipmenftwears out, said Melanie technology facilitator at the Gwinnett The power and broadband infrastructure around data centers are top-notch, and that benefitsz all residents in the community. AXA will have a combinee 200,000 square feet of data center space, wherre it will process business transactions andbackupp data. The consolidation is expectec tosave AXA, which employsw more than 110 in metro about $50 million.
Atlanta “has good redundancu of both networkand power, which is criticakl to data centers,” AXA’s Murray “It’s far enough from the coastline to not have to worryt about hurricanes.” Affordable and reliable electric supply, industrhy insiders said, make Atlanta prime data cente r real estate.