SOUTHFIELD — Metro Detroit is now home to another major new data center.
Troy-based TelNet Worldwide Inc. took the wraps off the 40,000-square-foot building — near Eight Mile and Lahser roads in Southfield — Wednesday morning, before an audience that included business leaders, state and local politicians, vendors and potential customers.
“This is an empowering asset for the region, for businesses located here and for businesses considering locating here,” said TelNet founder, president and chief technology officer Mark Iannuzzi.
The center features 20,000 square feet of rack space on a 30-inch raised floor, up to five megawatts of power capacity from DTE Energy, two 600-kilowatt backup diesel generators for power outages (with the capacity to add four more), and data capacity up to a mind-boggling 1.7 terabytes (trillion bytes) per second, from multiple redundant internet connections. And that data capacity can be increased virtually without limit, thanks to the proximity of several major carriers’ fiber optic lines in the area.
The center is also designed for a high power density per data cabinet for today’s multicore servers — more than 20 kilowatts per cabinet — and is designed with walls and locked doors separating the data cabinets from their HVAC and power support, for both security and ease of maintenance.
Iannuzzi said the center will power critical applications for companies in engineering, manufacturing, health care, retail and more — applications that “when they don’t work, bad things happen. Which is why we go to fanatical lengths to ensure our clients’ servers and applications are humming and safe.”
The data center was designed and built by EdgeConneX, a data center builder based in Herndon, Va., whose CEO, Randall Brouckman, is a graduate of the University of Michigan, and before that, North Farmington High School.
Brouckman said that when he met with Iannuzzi and TelNet CEO Patrick O’Leary, “it became pretty clear that we had a shared vision, and it happened in one meeting, which is pretty remarkable.”
He said Michigan has been underserved with high-end data centers, and that “if the internet of everything is going to happen, then there also has to be the internet of everywhere.”
He said he viewed the data center as an “opportunity to give back and help create an intelligent economy” in Michigan — adding that when he graduated with a computer engineering degree from UM in the mid-80s, “I had 14 job offers, and not one of them was in Michigan.”
Iannuzzi, also a UM grad in mechanical engineering, founded TelNet in 1999. O’Leary joined the company in 2008, after his former employer, Long Distance of Michigan Inc., which had supplied connectivity to TelNet, was sold.
Company officials said the new data center offers tight security, with individual one-time PIN numbers for customers and maintenance workers required for entry. They are granted by remote network operations centers that will monitor the data center around the clock.
The company broke ground on the new building in July, started filling in the interior in January, and moved the first customer in in February.
The data center is also built to LEED Silver energy efficiency standards, with LED lighting activated by motion sensors.
TelNet will offer colocation, managed hosting and disaster recovery services in the new data center, which is operated to Tier III industry standards, guaranteeing 99.982 percent uptime. (That works out to downtime of about an hour and a half a year.) Tier III also requires dual-powered equipment, multiple internet links and redundant components.
For more information on TelNet data center services, visit
www.telnetww.com/data-center.html. More about data center builder EdgeConneX at www.edgeconnex.com.