Sunday, April 10, 2011

Cisco To Showcase Allen Texas Data Center

In June 2009 I wrote about a new data center being built in Allen, Texas for Cisco. On Friday, April 15th they will showcase this new facility, including a live broadcast on Ustream.

See this site for a nice chronicle of the facility. The project won the Dallas Business Journal's Best Real Estate Deal award.

Cisco IT at work has a piece on the specifications for the facility and how they are using all of the latest Cisco gear as well as well as ecosystem partners EMC, VMware and NetApp.

Some interesting facts about the Allen, TX site:
  • 162,000 square foot
  • 10MW
  • It will run Cisco's IT Elastic Infrastructure Services - their own internal enterprise cloud
  • 10 Cisco UCS Seed clusters, or over 400 servers total
  • Will run as a 'metro virtual data center' - applications running simultaneously with those in their neighboring Richardson, Texas facility.
  • Diesel Rotary UPS System (DRUPS) presumably from Euro Diesel

It is a pretty interesting case in applying lessons learned and really gearing a data center for massive scalability and with as much 'future-proofing' as possible.

Finally - not that any IT work in this facility should have any long wait times -- but just in case, it looks like there are 'just a few' outlet stores nearby.