By Linda Jarrett
Where would we be without data centers? Those buildings that
hold millions of bytes of information on millions of people
and companies?
The St. Louis region does not lack for companies with national
and global connections, and maintaining these connections requires
constant monitoring and updating. To keep on the cutting edge
of the growing informational technology field, several state-of-the-art
data centers have recently come on line in our area.
Monsanto Enterprise
Data Center
The Monsanto Company is moving out of its 40-year old data center
into its new 40,000-square-foot, $21 million facility, which
will debut in September.
“Our old facility was part of an existing office building,”
Chief Information Officer Mark Showers says. “The new facility
is a stand-alone, state-of-the-art data center built specifically
for high reliability and availability, so it has redundant power
trains and cooling built into it which the current center does
not.”
As a scientific research-based corporation, Monsanto has to
ensure that transfer of information occurs in a seamless and
timeless manner.
“Whether it’s a researcher analyzing the corn genome or someone
in logistics trying to track a customer order from somewhere
around the world, it all runs through St. Louis,” Showers says.
“Our entire global operations for the company will run through
this data center whether you’re taking a transaction or order
from Thailand, India, Iowa or France,” he says.
The prime issue with data centers is redundancy and cooling
capacity. While computers keep getting smaller, and when they
are put in a smaller area, they generate more heat. To counteract
the heat build-up, the floors are raised which not only creates
more air flow, it also provides storage for the vast amount
of cables used.
“Cooling capacity is probably more important than how big they
are,” Showers says, explaining that the distance underneath
the raised floors in their new facility is twice as much as
their previous facility. “Plus, the distance from the raised
floor to the ceiling is also more which gives more capacity
for the air to move around and cool the computers.”
Construction for the new data center has also been focused on
achieving LEEDS© certification.
Fox Architects designed the building, William Tao & Associates
did the mechanical/ electrical and McCarthy Company was the
general contractor.
Smurfit-Stone World Headquarters
Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation recently moved their data
center from Alton, Ill. to their new headquarters at 6 CityPlace
in Creve Coeur, Mo. where they occupy eight floors.
Jim Adams, director of infrastructure, says that the reason
for the move was the fact that they had closed “four or five”
Smurfit locations around the St. Louis area. “The data center
had to go someplace, so it came along for the ride!”
This allowed the new center to expand from 7,000 square feet
to 15,000 square feet.
“We’re using about 5,000 to 7,000 square feet now,” Adams says.
“But we have a lot of room to expand which we will need in the
future.”
The center incorporates some features that the Alton facility
did not have, such as two feeds for power in from both ends
of the building just for the data center.
“We also have dual power going into each server,” Adams says.
“This is a nice fall back from a disaster recovery standpoint,
and for the ultimate fall back from that, we have three hours
of battery life, and an automatic kick on from the diesel generator.
That is really ‘Plan C’ from a business continuity standpoint.”
Adams says that even though their new center has all the necessary
redun- dancies, they have to have a plan should the building
not be available. “In that case, we would transfer our critical
systems to Chicago.”
There is also protection built around the building against backhoes.
“If they have to dig up in one place,” Adams says, “there would
still be network connections in another.”
While Media Relations Manager Tim Rowden did not divulge the
amount of the center, he did say that it came under the $4 million
budget.
XIOLINK Data Centers
Located in the Bandwidth Exchange Build-ing, 900 Walnut St.,
Xiolink LLC is a managed hosting company that provides outsourced
information technology infrastructure.
They are currently in the process of a three-phased expansion,
the first, a 2,000- square-foot expansion, due for completion
in July, Phase Two, a 5,000 square feet due this fall, and Phase
Three, a 10,000 to 15,000-square-foot addition, is targeted
for the spring of 2008.
The Bick Group will be the contractor. Costs for Phase One and
Two are estimated at $4 million with Phase Three at $7 to $8
million, according to CEO Brad Pittinger.
XIOLINK was founded in 1999 as RackMy.com, an InfoMedia Company,
providing Internet solutions and customized services including
managed servers, managed firewalls and collocation.
To accommodate increasing demands of their clients and to add
new services, RackMy.com purchased a state-of-the-art data center.
This increase in capabilities and business success elevated
the company from a start-up ISP to a World Class provider of
data hosting and networking with a solid reputation for reliability
and performance. In 2003, the company changed their name to
XIOLINK.
“The center is state of the art, highly redundant with high
availability,” Pittinger says. “It provides a critical infrastructure
no matter what’s going on.”
Xiolink, a privately held business, has shown a profit every
year, Pittinger says. “Which is unusual in the IT industry.
It’s a very young industry and we were one of the early companies
in, especially in our market niche of high-end managed hosting.”
Pittinger explained that there are two Bandwidth Buildings,
with the other located at 210 N. Tucker. “Every major carrier
in this region comes through these buildings, the advantage
being that we have access to every carrier for our customer.
The Walnut Street location is the primary building.”
Scottrade
In Scottrade’s new data center in West County, computers hum
in a silent, sterile, slightly chilly environment. The equipment
takes up just half of the new expansion site, but the space
will not remain empty for very long.
The $25 million, 34,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art data center
included a major redesign of the firm’s IT infrastructure.
As Chief information Officer Ian Patterson walked among the
tall banks of computers, he said that their previous data center
was in an office building. “We were getting close to capacity
and knew that we would need a new facility. From a data center
perspective, one of the biggest issues with office space is
that they typically don’t have enough height to get air flow
because heat dispensation is critical for data center usage.”
Instead of building a new center, Scottrade found a building
they could reconform to their needs. They also had to have it
located in an area with a more stable power grid that would
fare well in the event of storms.
“We’ve tripled our network bandwidth coming in to this facility,”
Patterson says.
Televisions line the walls in one office, some tuned to activities
outside and inside the building, some to local stations and
two are showing CNN and The Weather Channel.
Patterson explains that needing to know about the external factors
that could affect their business. Weather and current events
are two crucial factors.
“We’re considered the fastest on the net,” he says. “Our average
web site speed (the time it takes to login, place a trade and
log off) is three seconds. That is critical because if you’re
an active trader and the market is making a change, you need
to get your change in fast. Latency, for us, is one of the bellweathers
that we have to track on a daily basis.”
“This is the largest investment in new technology that Scottrade
has ever made,” Rodger Riney, president and CEO of Scottrade,
said in a statement. “We have seen remarkable growth in recent
years, and this data center will allow our technology and customer
base to continue.”
Paric Corporation was general contractor and Arcturis was the
architectural firm for the project.
