Colo building data center in a former shopping mall:
Colo building data center in a former shopping mall DATE: 14 May 2009
Lifeline Data Centers, a colocation company based in Indianapolis, is taking an old shopping mall property and turning it into a data center facility. The Eastgate Mall, which has been closed since 2004, has become an eyesore in the city.
Lifeline will spend about $23 million to transform the property to make it more appealing and bring in tax money for the city. The first phase will turn into 60,000 square feet of data center space in a spot where Wasson's – an old department store – and a Burlington Coat Factory once stood. The company then plans to build four 100,000-square-foot data centers on the south and east sides of the property.
Reworking a shopping mall site into a data center isn't easy. Though the construction of the building's foundation is solid, a food court doesn't take as much power as thousands of servers, and so Lifeline had to rework the power infrastructure.
On the cooling side, Lifeline is taking a novel approach by building its own air handlers at about half the cost of buying them off the shelf. Most of the work is already done, with one customer already testing equipment there. Co-owner Alex Carroll said Lifeline expects to have about 12 customers up and running by August.
Check out this 6-minute video on how Lifeline is transforming a shopping mall into a data center.
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