Albuquerque ranked No. 8 in a recent study of cities that would make good locations for free-standing corporate data centers.
The Boyd Company, a Princeton, N.J., site selector, considered a wide range of factors, from costs of doing business to insulation from natural disasters, to rank 35 cities.
Most of the cities in the study, including Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, are already hosts to major financial institutions and corporate data operations. But about 10 of the cities, including Albuquerque, could be the next hot location for companies looking to improve information security and manage increasingly complex requirements ushered in by the Sarbanes-Oxley rules and the Patriot Act.
Boyd, whose clients include PepsiCo, Hewlett-Packard and Progressive Insurance, analyzed available financial services labor-training costs, land and construction costs, utility and travel costs and other burdens.
New York was the most expensive city, with an annual operating cost for a 75-employee, 125,000-square-foot data center topping $14 million.
Albuquerque's operating costs for a similar center would be about $11 million, the study found. When other factors, such as availability of robust telecommunications networks and skilled workers were added, the Duke City came in at No. 8.
Sioux Falls, S.D., ranked No. 1, followed by San Antonio, Texas; Ames, Iowa; and Des Moines, Iowa.
Sioux Falls has a university-based information assurance education program and recently landed an $85 million disaster recovery center project from payroll processing giant ADP.
Andrew Webb covers technology for the Journal. You can reach him at 823-3819 or awebb@abqjournal.com.
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