Hawthorne New York Data Center Brings IT Resiliency to NYC

Location. Location. Location. Anyone who’s ever looked at siting a new building knows what a difference location can make. Perhaps no one knows it better than companies based in and around New York City looking for a data center to house their mission-critical applications and data. While NYC has some of the best amenities in the world, it does come with some big-city IT resiliency challenges, from power outages to major flooding.

When we were looking for a data center location to serve our NYC-based customers, we chose Hawthorne, NY. Located in Westchester County, about 35 miles from New York City, this city of roughly 5,000 people has the quiet feel of a small town, yet it’s close enough to NYC and numerous business corridors to provide reduced latencies for our many corporate customers.

4 reasons why Hawthorne, NY is a great data center alternative to NYC

Hawthorne is an ideal location for organizations looking to improve their infrastructure resiliency. Here are four reasons why:

1. Hawthorne provides great direct connectivity to NYC and neighboring states

Big cities mean big and fast connections. Sitting less than 20 minutes away from the city allows you to continue to provide lower latency to your customers in the region. From our experience, being near the city has also improved our ability to provide direct cloud connectivity for our data center clients. Because we’re so close to the city, we’ve also established a private, dark fiber connection to 60 Hudson Street and 111 8^th Ave. This keeps connectivity fast and reliable for our clients.

Hawthorne’s proximity to surrounding states also allowed us to install multiple, private DWDM fiber rings to connect our Hawthorne data centers to our other data centers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

2. Hawthorne’s power grid is designed with resiliency in mind

Despite the state’s record of grid stability, New York City, like all big cities, can experience blackouts due to grid overload and aging infrastructure. In fact, just last July a major power outage struck Midtown Manhattan, affecting thousands of residents and businesses.

Consolidated Edison (ConEd), the power supplier to New York City and Westchester County, has been instrumental in improving resiliency by establishing independent network grids that prevent power failures from cascading from one area to the next. These grids also leverage redundant power supply sources to reduce service disruptions even more.

Much of this infrastructure, e.g., transformers, is installed below ground, which lessens the impact of weather conditions on reliability and decreases the likelihood of accidental or malicious damage. If you’d like to read more about ConEd’s plans to continue modernizing its grid infrastructure in NYC and Westchester County, you can access their long-range plan here.

New York has one of the most stable power grids in the country.

3. Hawthorne sits outside major threat zones

None of us like to think about it, but New Yorkers are perhaps more aware than most of the threat of terrorism. Being in a data center outside of the city limits is one of the most effective ways to stay up and running in a worst-case scenario. Hawthorne also sits outside of the shared border threat zone between New York and Connecticut.

4. Hawthorne is outside the 500-year flood zone

As anyone on the East Coast knows, New York can experience some wild weather, from major downpours to mountains of snow that result in a powerful runoff in early spring. In 2012, flooding from Hurricane Sandy left many in NYC without power for days and had major impacts on the city’s infrastructure. Hawthorne, NY is outside of the 500-year flood zone (and hundreds of feet above sea level), giving both businesses located in New York City and broader Westchester County a more disaster-resilient option.

According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), a 500-year flood zone is an area where annual exceedance probability is .02%. That means that the area has a 1 in 500 chance of a catastrophic flood (or “500-year flood”) in a given year.

Come see for yourself, take the tour

Our Hawthorne, NY data center has plenty of additional features as well, such as business continuity suites that can be used should a customer’s on-premises data center (or office building) become inoperable. And, we have plenty of resiliency features built in, e.g., carrier neutrality, independent power sources, redundant UPS systems, and 2N power generators.

To learn more, download our Hawthorne, NY data center spec sheet or schedule a tour today.