Data center facilities and companies, are provided in the directory below, including facility locations and company descriptions. We provide this as a service to our economic development clients who are looking to understand the substantial scale and number of players in this relatively new industry.
Just as the Internet and all it has brought to the world, data centers have emerged only recently as an investor asset class. For perspective, Google designed and built its first purpose-built data center (code-named Project 02) in The Dalles (Oregon) in 2006 – just 14 years ago.
A data center is a physical facility where critical data and software applications are situated within a large quantity of vertical racks housing computing and storage devices.
As an industry, data center facilities and companies are subject to an unusually rapid technology life cycle. Ever evolving consumer and business demand for data-intensive products (and services) directly impacts what data centers become.
One example, so-called “edge computing” is emerging in 2020 as a particularly interesting adjustment to how and where data is streamed. Edge computing is a nuance on data centers where the idea is to place data storage and processing as close to where the customer is creating the need – at “the edge.”