Sabey Commissions High-Rise Data Center

NEW YORK CITY-For its largest installation to date and its first in a CBD, Seattle-based Sabey Data Center Properties went vertical, repurposing a 32-story former Verizon data center high-rise in Lower Manhattan. On Wednesday, SDCP commissioned Intergate.Manhattan, a one-million-square-foot facility at 375 Pearl St.

“From here forward, New York City will be able to say it has the most advanced, energy-efficient and high-rise data center in the world,” SDCP president David Sabey said at a press conference marking the commissioning. Intergate.Manhattan's first phase provides more than 100,000 square feet of data center space and 5.4 megawatts of power. Ultimately, the property will accommodate 40 mW of data center capacity on 600,000 square feet of floor space, along with 400,000 square feet of infrastructure.

After paying $120 million in June 2011 to acquire the principal condominium interest in 375 Pearl from M&T Bank, which took control of the tower from Taconic Investment Partners after plans to reclad it and reposition it as an office building fell through, SDCP completely overhauled its infrastructure, calling on National Real Estate Advisors as real estate co-investor. However, some aspects of the property as it was built didn't need overhauling, and in fact made it better suited to SDCP's purposes: the heavy-duty floors at 375 Pearl, for example, along with 23-foot ceiling heights that better accommodate the massive backup generators that would kick in during a utility outage. The facility's Con Edison substation is on the second floor, helping to ensure that a Sandy-like storm surge wouldn't knock it out, Sabey said.

The 17 floors of data center space at 375 Pearl will each include 400 refrigerator-size cabinets, it was revealed during a press tour following the conference. Each of those cabinets can accommodate up to 40 servers, for a total of about 272,000 servers when Intergate.Manhattan becomes fully operational. “The connectivity to the rest of the world is enormous,” Sabey said at Wednesday's conference.

It comes at a time when the New York metro area is becoming a technology hub. Even without Intergate.Manhattan, there has been a 30% surge in tech-related jobs in New York City over the past seven years, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Wednesday. Furthermore, five million square feet of data center space has been leased in the tri-state area, Bloomberg said.

Additionally, the financial, media, health and tech industries here all are relying increasingly on large-scale data capacity, said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City. She called Intergate.Manhattan “a critical piece for New York City's technology sector to move to the next level.” Similarly, Bloomberg assured the audience that Intergate.Manhattan would “ensure that New York City is ready to meet that demand.”

The property's first tenant is the New York Genome Center, a compute and storage platform for 12 leading medical institutions to handle the big-data challenges that lead to genomics being brought to bear on patient care. “Genome sequencing is the scientific revolution of the 21st century,” said Dr. Robert Darnell, CEO of the Genome Center. The revolution, in this case, requires enormous data-crunching capacity.

Although the Genome Center is the facility's first tenant, Sabey anticipates that it will soon have plenty of company. He cited interest from several prospective tenants. Leasing agents for Intergate.Manhattan are a Newmark Grubb Knight Frank team led by David Falk, president of the New York tri-state region, and Michael Morris and Bryan Loewen of NGKF's Data Center Consulting Group.