According to Pennsylvania local media, a Wall Street West initiative developer, Larry Stuardi has reportedly given permission to Plainview-based Computer Network Solutions (CNS) for a data centre in a 140,000ft┬▓ facility in Breinigsville.
Stuardi's Tek Park is a seven-building complex originally developed by AT&T; Bell Labs as a research center. Stuardi's development firm, MRA Group, bought the property from TriQuint Semiconductor last year for $9.3 million. The park includes the facility that will serve as the CNS data center, which is wired for up to 150W per square foot of power. The property has its own sub station and six 2MW generators. CNS says it plans to operate a colocation and managed hosting facility for clients in the financial services industries.
Stuardi is one of several local developers seeking to attract financial services firms to locate disaster recovery hot sites in the Pocono Mountains. Developer Larry Simon is seeking to line up anchor data center tenants for The Penn Regional Business Center, a proposed 300,000ft ┬▓ development scheduled to break ground in Monroe County in June 2007.
The Wall Street West initiative is backed by a $15 million investment from the federal government and more than $6 million from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The state was awarded a Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) grant in February by the US Department of Labor.
In the wake of 9/11, the Securities and Exchange Commission recommended that financial services firms develop reliable backup operations outside the New York City power grid that would allow for a same-day recovery from a "regional disaster" affecting New York and its immediate suburbs.
A northeastern Pennsylvania task force prepared a white paper in 2003 that cited the advantages for locating Wall Street's secondary operations in northeastern Pennsylvania. The report was a key element for the grant proposal.
The plan called for backup centers to be located outside the New York metro area, a request that met with resistance from many Wall Street firms with huge investments in secondary data centers in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Northern New Jersey.
The Wall Street West initiative is more than 60 miles from New York and thus outside any blast radius, but within the 125-mile distance that marks the outer limits of many real-time data mirroring technologies.