Cologix, one of the country’s most prolific data center operators, recently unveiled a new state-of-the-art facility in Downtown East’s 511 Building, the company’s MSP headquarters. According to a company press release, the 28,000-square-foot hub has space for more than 250 server cabinets and upward of 70 network connections, making it the most connected piece of real estate between Chicago and Seattle — the Internet capital of The North.
“People think of the Internet as this ethereal cloud,” says Graham Williams, chief operating officer, Cologix. “But in reality, that cloud is very solid. The world is crisscrossed with untold miles of fiber optic cables and dotted with servers, routers and switches. That physical infrastructure — the Internet’s plumbing — intersects at data hubs like [the 511 Building].”
The heart of Cologix’s new facility is the Meet Me Room, the hub where the networks actually intersect. Clients who rent space in the facility can pick and choose which networks to use. The setup is akin to a co-working space: Tenants pay to be there and provide their own equipment, but they get access to most of the service providers operating in MSP.
They also enjoy lower latency (faster connection speeds), which is particularly important in the video streaming business. “We enable companies like Netflix to get closer to their end users,” explains Mike Hemphill, general manager of Cologix’s Minneapolis facility. “They’re pushing copies of the shows and movies people want to watch to their servers here in Minneapolis, rather than calling everything up from California and traversing thousands of miles of fiber to get here.”
Increased competition for clients in the Meet Me Room reduces’ service providers’ pricing power by as much as 20 to 40 percent, says Williams. But it’s a worthwhile tradeoff. The alternative is an expensive, piecemeal approach wherein providers lay fiber all the way to clients’ offices, wherever they might be located. Depending on the fiber’s final cost per mile, directly connecting to clients could end up being less cost-effective than using a facility like the 511 Building.
Cologix’s new data center also houses the
Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange (MICE), a nonprofit, donation-supported network exchange used by smaller Internet service providers and telecoms as well as data-hungry content providers like Netflix. MICE was devised in 2010 to improve MSP-area bandwidth and connection speeds, and to level the playing field for smaller operators. FWR Communications, Cologix’s predecessor in the 511 Building, donated a modest square footage to house MICE’s first servers; with more than 50 participants at last count, MICE is now a major Cologix tenant.
“It’s an exciting time to be in this business,” muses Hemphill, whose telecommunications career has spanned nearly a half-century. “I’ve had more fun in the last decade than at any time previously.”