Big data company CoreSite chooses NJ over NYC to be more reliable, cost-effective

CoreSite CEO Tom Ray would like to think businesses consider his big data storage company because of its temperature-controlled facilities, around-the-clock IT maintenance and proven ability to cut electricity costs and storage space.But when the company opened its first New Jersey facility in Secaucus last week, Ray knew the honest truth: They just want to be protected from the next natural disaster.

“People are taking a harder look at the reliability and security of their facilities,” he said. “These disasters make us look again.”

Actually, they helped make CoreSite look good.

CoreSite’s downtown New York City site was one of the few data centers to remain unaffected throughout the course of Hurricane Sandy, maintaining 100 percent uptime by proactively switching to back-up power, avoiding surge complications, and having enough fuel to keep generators running.

But a data center with 99.9999 percent uptime over the past three years across its portfolio wasn’t willing to risk its reputation. After all, CoreSite watched several New York data centers such as Internap and Datagram crumble around them during Sandy, and popular websites such as Gawker, Huffington Post and Buzzfeed go offline completely.

Instead, CoreSite believed that building a data center away from the main hub in New York City would be more conducive to reliable data and communications. New Jersey, of course, was most attractive for its economical and connectivity purposes.

“The cost of power in Manhattan is double what it is in New Jersey, and the effective cost of ownership in this area is about 50 percent of that of NYC,” CoreSite Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Management Brian Warren said, noting these significant cost savings reduce CoreSite’s customer pricing for its New Jersey regions.

“In addition, if you look at the geography of Secaucus and Manhattan, we’re located extremely close in terms of fiber distance,” he said.

That means that CoreSite can provide the same speed and service capability to get information into midtown or downtown from Secaucus as any other data center located in New York — another win for New Jersey.

Today, CoreSite operates 16 data centers in eight major communications markets across the U.S., serving more than 800 customers with a portfolio totaling more than 2.5 million square feet.

While CoreSite works with many industries, including finance, insurance, education, health care and media production, they cater to TV and Internet providers, P2P exchanges, IT specialists and cloud computing providers with an average threshold of 500 to 1,000 employees.

“It’s been a very fast evolution, but it’s now commonplace to stream whatever information you need, whatever entertainment you want, on a real-time basis, from multiple sources, wirelessly,” Warren said. “And CoreSite wants to ensure that we make available whatever our clients are looking for.”

In addition to providing endless entertainment and business productivity, Ray said data centers are also crucial for global connectivity. Most international Internet data and phone calls are transmitted via hundreds of undersea fiber optic cables, many of which have been repeatedly severed in undersea earthquakes between the West Coast and Asia over the past 10 years.

“We are the healing point for communication between North America and Asia. Our source technicians literally work around the clock, putting more ports in and helping our countries communicate,” Ray said. “I think the Internet is a truly amazing, beautiful and powerful thing, and we can help it. That’s a big deal.”