The New York City (NYC) data center market is a top 5 market in North America. A quick pro/con for a NYC datacenter deployment:
NYC Advantages:
- Large population of 35 million people (NY + New England)
- Rich connectivity options via many NY carrier hotels
- Lots of Retail colocation choices
NYC Disadvantages:
- Real Estate is Expensive
- Electrical pricing is high
- The area is prone to disasters or disruptions
- Limited Wholesale datacenter options
NY Demographics
NYC is the largest metro in North America and is headquarters for 55 companies in the S&P500. New England and NY have a combined population of approximately 35 million. The large population makes it an attractive market to place an enterprise or collocation data center.
New York City as a Single Point of Failure:
NYC has one of the most a robust telecom marketplaces in the world. However, the metro is also a regional single point of failure. Almost all of New England’s Internet traffic runs through NY. A massive outage in NY would likely limit connectivity to New England. However, adding a deployment in Boston would keep services New England up and running in the event of an outage in NY.
Telecom Hotels in NYC:
The city has more telecom hotels than any other city in the Americas. Listed in order of importance:
111 8th Ave in Manhattan: A massive building that is a full city block, 111 8th is like a sky scrapper laid on its side. The building is only 16 stories but has 2.9 million square feet (2700,000 m2) making it the 4th largest building in NY. Google acquired the building in 2011 for $1.9 Billion. Despite churning out some datacenter space to make way for Google offices, 111 8th still has the best connectivity in NY.
60 Hudson in Manhattan: Built in 1930 for the Western Union telegraph company, the building was the nexus of telegraph infrastructure. Today, the initial telegraph bones provide a good conduit infrastructure for fiber cables connecting internet companies. Digital Realty (through the Telx acquisition) runs the building’s Meet Me Room
32 Avenue of the Americas is a tertiary telecom hotel in Manhattan.
165 Halsey: A large (1.2m Sqft) telecom hotel, 165 Halsey located across the Hudson River in Newark.
Financial Low Latency Ecosystem in Secaucus
New York has a large low-latency high-frequency trading ecosystem. Most of the ecosystem is centered in Equinix's NY2/NY4 Secaucus data centers, where market platforms, buy-side, sell-side, and market data providers all colocate near each other to edge out the fasted possible trade executions.
New York Retail Colocation
There are over 100 data center providers in the NY metro. The best colo deployment options depend on location, connectivity, and deployment size requirements. National colo providers with NYC data centers are Equinix, Cyxtera, CoreSite, Atlantic Metro, Internap, vXchnge, Zayo, Cologix and Sungard.
NYC Wholesale Space
Wholesale data center space in New York is expensive. Many multi-megawatt wholesale data center deployments are placed in regions with less expensive electrical and real estate costs. That said, the New York metro has rich network connectivity and content can be served to a large population. Beyond Sabey and DataGryd, there are limited wholesale options in Manhattan. Top Wholesale providers outside of Manhattan are Iron Mountain, Digital Realty, and QTS.
