Liquid Web opens 'cloud'-enabling data center
Date: Nov 12, 2009
Lansing, Mich. – Web hoster Liquid Web Inc. opened a new data center on Wednesday. The 90,000-square-foot facility took about 15 months to build at a cost of around $80 million.
The company estimates that the data center has the capacity for 25,000 servers and will add 600 employees. That large head count is mainly because of Storm, the new cloud computing platform Liquid Web plans to roll out late this year or early in 2010.
CEO Matt Hill said Storm will compete with other major cloud offerings such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. The basics are this: Instead of customers renting physical servers in a data center, they buy services as needed. So if a retailer needs more compute power around the holidays, it can ramp up its infrastructure using a Storm API, and then scale it back down when the busy season ends.
The facility is largely vacant now as it just opened, but Hill said the company hopes to fill it out in three years.
