Markley Building Out 50MW Boston Metro Data Center

Markley Group has acquired a 350,000-square-foot building in Lowell, Massachusetts, it plans to convert into a 50-megawatt data center. Phase one is expected to be available in October.

The new data center is massive, albeit dwarfed by its counterpart a 30-minute drive away in Boston. Markley owns and operates a 920,000-square-foot Boston data center at One Summer Street and believes the new facility will complement that property. The company recently raised $240 million to help finance data center expansion, both in iconic One Summer and other properties.

Markley operates more than 3 million square feet of data center space and also offers a multi-site cloud, launched in 2013. The company’s One Summer property is one of the leading Boston data center hubs and easily one of the largest data centers in New England, with rich carrier connectivity and 12 utility feeds from multiple substations.

The new data center will appeal to Boston customers in need of a good disaster recovery location. Latency between the two sites is less than one millisecond, said the company, making it perfect for asynchronous replication.

While the upcoming Boston metro data center is ideal for DR, it will very likely serve as a primary data center for some. Lowell is the fourth largest city in Massachusetts, and, like in other major markets, more businesses are becoming comfortable with outsourcing to the wider metro area.

The three-story building has good bones. It has 18-foot ceilings and can handle 600 pounds of load per square foot. It sits on 14 acres of land and has access to a lot of power. Diverse dark fiber networks will connect Lowell to One Summer, giving customers access to 80 network providers located at Markley’s flagship facility.

Markley is building out additional disaster recovery features, such as 1,000 "hot seats" of secure workspace with network access and backup systems ready to go in case of an emergency.

Markley said it is currently working with various officials and university representatives in seeking local talent to work at the new Boston metro data center.

“In keeping with our philosophy of best-in-class offerings, the Lowell facility will be a state-of-the-art world class facility,” said Jeffrey Markley, CEO of Markley Group, in a press release. “With One Summer Street being the center of the universe for network connectivity in the region, our diverse dark fiber pathways to Lowell will extend those advantages to clients of the facility.”