A BRIEF HISTORY
An iconic building formerly known as the Western Union Building was built in 1929 and provided one of the earliest forms of data transmission. During those days, information was exchanged by men and women on roller skates carrying telegrams from one end of the building to the other. 60 Hudson evolved and became a telecom hotel. For the last 20 years, being densely populated by traditional service providers, it became a hub for voice and then data. The building today has over 300 service providers, including traditional domestic and international providers, be it ISPs, Cloud providers, content companies or peering fabrics.
DataGryd was born in 2011. One of the founders of Telx had the foresight to transform four floors into data centers. These four floors were occupied by city agencies such as the Department of Buildings and the Department of Corrections. DataGryd took down two of the four floors and transformed it into 120K sq. ft. of world-class data center space.
The transformation into data center space presents its own set of challenges. One has to deal with the legacy telecommunications providers as you are retrofitting the suites. There are significant cost implications when you are providing power to different floors. It was a costly effort to retrofit the environment inside. Nevertheless, we were able to provide ourselves with a clean slate. With the emergence of 5G, AI and IoT, we believe that dense power requirements will be critical for these applications in the years to come. We have a total of 15 MW of power for our data center on the fifth and sixth floor of the building. That is unheard of in a metro area. 60 Hudson is one of the most iconic and recognizable building in the United States and probably globally as well. As an interconnection hub, we offer a latency-driven environment for applications. There will be new augmented subsea cable providers who will interconnect and terminate in the building.
NEW FIBER ROUTES AND DIVERSITY
There is revitalization of new fiber that will terminate within this building, particularly coming from subsea as well as terrestrial routes. The new routes will focus on diversity to Northern Virginia. There’s also the ability to access the cable landing stations on Long Island. The consumption of bandwidth is driven by the content providers and they look at their traffic forensically. They realize diversity is critical and it’s also about load balancing their traffic. Their network consumption has increased 2x to 3x annually. There’s also contraction happening at 111 Eighth Avenue, another interconnection hub that was bought by Google. As customers at 111 Eighth Avenue are looking at other options, 60 Hudson Street is a natural progression point.
INTERCONNECTION AND BANDWIDTH CONUNDRUM
Interconnection has been a key component of our customers’ outsourcing strategy. Bandwidth pricing continues to see reduction. Cross connects, within a suite or floors within the building, have created a challenge. DataGryd offers a product called Direct Connect that mitigates the monthly cross connect charges. We are bringing a change to the marketplace and specifically here at 60 Hudson Street, where we don’t charge for cross connects. Through our lease, we provide a four-inch conduit to enables customers to install their own fiber cable and simply pay a one-time fee for the interconnection and a monthly fee for the rental of the conduit.
DataGryd can custom design solutions offering power, space requirements considering the TCO. We offer both retail and wholesale colocation products in a hybrid environment. We service multinational financial companies and large corporations, whether they are hospitality or healthcare on the enterprise side. Our focus is traditional carriers, service providers, both domestic and international, emerging providers such as the MSOs, cable providers, content, gaming and cloud providers. We also provide services to smaller colocation providers in the denomination of 100 kW, but do not offer the rack or cabinet business.
THE EXPANSION AT 60 HUDSON
We are building a 1 MW data hall to accommodate smaller spaces. One megawatt or greater parcels of space are just not that common anymore in the metro because of the low cost of fiber that they can back-haul to larger data center farms. The data is processed here and then back-hauled to larger data server farms. We hear a new term “edge data centers” all the time as we have been known to become an edge data center in New York City. Another diversity element in our infrastructure is that we have four 3 MW generators that reside on the 24th floor. We ensure to take best measures from an environmental perspective by installing generators in a spot that will not be hindered in any way during a storm, rather than keeping them in basement. We are building out a 1MW data hall and have the ability to build out a total of five data halls on the sixth floor.
THE NEW YORK-ASHBURN CONNECTION
New York and Ashburn complement each other from a connectivity perspective. New York is the gateway to Europe, Central and South America. There has been significant growth in the Northern Virginia area which can’t be compared in any way. The network providers in New York form a key gateway to all of technology and traditional telecommunications transmissions. So, Ashburn and New York are key routes and the industry continues to drive additional diversity through this critical corridor.