Yahoo formally opened its state-of-the-art data center in Lockport on Monday, in what company executives and local economic development officials say will be the first of several high-technology companies to locate sophisticated facilities in Western New York.
Carol Bartz, the Internet giant's CEO, joined Gov. David A. Paterson, Sen. Charles E. Schumer and a host of other state and local politicians in unveiling the new "server farm" at the Town of Lockport Industrial Park.
The project highlights the Sunnyvale, Calif., company's first use of a new environmentally friendly design that relies in large part on Western New York's cooler climate and the availability of low-cost hydropower to conserve energy and save on electricity costs.
"We're thrilled to unveil our world-class data center in Lockport and take an active role in the community," Bartz said. "Yahoo is serious about sustainability and is leading efforts to address climate change. That's why we believe in creating highly efficient data centers that minimize the impact on the environment."
With about 50,000 computer servers, the new facility will be the company's East Coast data center, powering Yahoo's network of sites that includes its e-mail and instant messenger service and Flickr. It began operations quietly several weeks ago, hosting the e-mail accounts for Yahoo customers on the East Coast.
The facility opened just 13 months after breaking ground in a muddy field in August 2009. Now that the central facility is open, company officials said, they can add more buildings in as little as six months.
The $150 million data center created up to 500 jobs during construction and will have at least 125 full-time employees -- 100 are already in place at the 155,000 square-foot site. But officials said they hope it will be the start of an even larger presence by Yahoo in Western New York.
"On every angle, what we've done in our project thus far is just a seed, almost a test to a certain extent," Scott Noteboom, Yahoo's vice president of data center operations and engineering, said in an interview. "Buffalo isn't just about a data center. We would like to spread our functions in more areas like Buffalo."
The second phase of Yahoo's project isn't even completed -- construction started in June and is slated to wrap up by December -- and local economic development officials are already seeing interest from other large technology-oriented firms.
"This project has put everything on the map and generated all the interest in the region," said Paul Pfeiffer, spokesman for the Buffalo Niagara Enterprise economic development organization.
"There are a number of high-technology, well-known companies that are interested in Western New York," said Richard M. Kessel, president and CEO of the State Power Authority. "It's low-cost power that will make it or break it. We will do whatever we can to do that."
In particular, sources said on condition of anonymity, local officials are courting a much larger data center project for Verizon Communications that would dwarf Yahoo's in size and scale. The New York-based telecommunications giant is considering Western New York along with two other states.
Sources said Verizon is considering property owned by energy firm AES Corp. in the Town of Somerset in northeastern Niagara County, immediately adjacent to the AES power plant, as well as in the nearby Town of Shelby in Orleans County. A decision is expected by year's end. Other companies have also indicated interest in Western New York, including Twitter, but Verizon is much further along in the process, the sources said.
"Having an international company of Yahoo's caliber establish a presence in Lockport opens the door to enormous possibility in locating other high-tech companies to Western New York," Paterson said, without being specific.
Meanwhile, Yahoo and Power Authority officials confirmed they have begun negotiations about getting additional low-cost hydropower to support an expansion of the project beyond what was already envisioned. The project was originally granted 15 megawatts of low-cost power by the Power Authority as one of the critical inducements to lure Yahoo here.
"We are currently under discussion with [the Power Authority] to further expand Yahoo's footprint in this location," said Yahoo Executive Vice President David Dibble, citing the possibility of "greater diversity of jobs" as well.
Data centers are hard to move once they are established and are difficult to put offshore, since they have to be within a 1,500-mile radius of the "end-users." So "when we build a data center, it's in our interest to continue to grow there," he said. Internally dubbed the "Yahoo Chicken Coop," the long, narrow design mimics a chicken coop to encourage natural air flow, using free cooling more than 99 percent of the time, so that less than 1 percent of a building's energy consumption is used to cool it.
Instead, it uses a combination of the area's cooler climate, prevailing winds from Lake Ontario and low-cost hydropower to keep the 120-foot-by-60-foot server buildings cool. That significantly reduces electricity use, so its power usage rating is about half that of the industry average.
Specifically, the company said, the data center will use at least 40 percent less energy and at least 95 percent less water than conventional facilities.
It also does not require wastewater treatment for its cooling system, while similar-sized centers result in more than 5 million gallons of wastewater. "This building here sets the standard by which data centers the world over are being measured," Dibble said.
In recognition, the company received a $9.9 million sustainability grant from the U.S. Department of Energy -- the largest award provided under the government's Green IT grant program.
Operationally, the facility includes the primary data center, as well as one of the company's global services desks, which provide technical help to Yahoo employees around the world.
Perhaps most significantly, it also includes one of the company's two global operations centers, which monitor the international network of Web sites and services to ensure they are up and running 24 hours a day. That operation had been in Bangalore, India, but the company closed it to bring the work to Western New York.
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Linny Lum is a lifestyle, celebrity, and pop culture multimedia writer. 