TechWise TV Tours Cisco's Allen, Texas Data Center

Last week Cisco released a really nice TechWise TV tour of their new Allen, Texas data center. First of all - Kudos to Cisco for explaining this level of detail about their new designs. Although much of what they showcase as cutting edge design methods are just that - they are things I've seen recently pop up in a number of other presentations about new data centers being built by Colo's, REIT's, etc.

Extra credit to Cisco for making it a 720p video :)

I always notice the brands used within the data center, and as such, here is what I saw in their video:

• Panduit cabinet infrastructure products
• Eaton power equipment
• Omni-ID products used for RFID tracking of equipment
• Trane Chillers
• Dolphin Water Care - water treatment
• EuroDiesel

They have created this interactive tour as well to walk through the various components of the data center.

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.

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New Cisco Data Center For Allen, Texas

Cisco announced today that they will build a 140,000 - 160,000 square foot data center in Allen, Texas. The facility is reported to cost $500 Million, employ 100 people and (wait for it....) Cisco will receive tax incentives. Cisco stock closed up 1.06% today at $20.08

The Allen Economic Development Corporation has a nice report on the the Data Center proposal for the Stacy Road location that Cisco is most likely building on. Good power, fiber connectivity and financial incentives = data center site selection. The local utility for this area, Oncor announced last week that the "World's largest concentration of smart grid voltage compensation equipment placed in service by Oncor".

Allen Texas is about 25 miles north of downtown Dallas. There is also a sizable Cingular data center just a little bit south of the Cisco site in Allen.

Check out the press release here

Here is a map of the Allen, Texas data center site

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