More than a year after it was announced with much fanfare, a data center is still in the works in Eagan, although with a smaller facility than originally planned.
Five 9s Digital of North Carolina no longer plans to house the data center, to be called The Connexion, in a newly built 138,000-square-foot facility on Yankee Doodle Road. The original cost for that project was to be at least $75 million.
The company instead plans to buy and redevelop an 88,000-square-foot building near Lexington Avenue and Yankee Doodle, previously used as a bakery outlet by Taystee Foods. Five 9s CEO Doug Hollidge declined to disclose the purchase price but said the revised plan will allow it to have the building ready sooner and at lower rental rates for tenants.
Hollidge said his firm has only recently begun marketing space in the building that will be retrofitted to suit the needs of users.
The data center will be designed to provide so-called "co-location" service, functioning as a sort of computer hotel for business customers. Tenants would include Internet service providers, telecommunications companies and businesses that need off-site data storage.
The idea to develop a data center in Eagan goes back several years, growing out of a study by the city that examined ways to make itself more attractive to tech-related businesses. The study identified the need for a data center in the south metro area, and the Eagan City Council embraced the concept, calling it "critical infrastructure," according to Tom Garrison, the city's communications director.
Currently the vast majority of the Twin Cities' public Internet traffic runs through a single facility in downtown Minneapolis and from there to Chicago, a major Internet intersection for the country. The Eagan facility would initially use a route to the Internet via Kansas City.
Garrison said most metro areas have more than one data center, so as to not depend on a single facility as a portal to the Internet. "We have companies here in Eagan that would lose significant amounts of money if the Internet connection ever went down," he said.