DataCenterKnowledge has an article detailing an effort to build another Wall Street West in Binghamton, for backup sites for wall street. Of course, it is Pennsylvania that started such an effort a while back that has been slow to get started. I have two thoughts on this.
First, if lack of existing fiber infrastructure is slowing the effort in PA , why would Binghamton have more luck? If there’s anyplace near Scranton/Allentown/Stroudsburg with less fiber running to, from, and around it, it’s Binghamton.
Second, why should we see this situation just as a competition? Binghamton isn’t very far from Scranton, state borders really don’t mean that much for such things. The datacenter business is a bit like that of chinese restaurants in the USA: when your town has one it starves because nobody takes it seriously, two survive because obviously people must have liked the first, and three or more thrive because obviously they must be good if there are so many. Northeast Pennsylvania and south central New York state are geographically one area, their parallel efforts may help rather than hurt each other.
Of course, with the Lehman and Merill news today and the drumbeat of more to come, the wall street backup business seems to be getting smaller every day…
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There was an earlier instantiation of a “Wall Street West” of sorts in The City of Brotherly Love going back about twenty years or so.
It took the form rentable space in Sungard’s Data Recovery facilities in PA. An access node to this site was situated in the second sub-basement of the WTC, where NY’s answer to Iron Mountain had set up shop (the Data port, as it was called) and tied to Philly-based Sungard by a high-speed f-o umbilical supplied by Sprint.
IIRC, Sprint supported a single-route, wowzing T3 or three (first set up over a 139Mb link, which amounted to three asynch T3s back then, which was prior to the ratification of SONET standards).
The fact that large banks and brokerages, as well as several of the NYSE affiliates (e.g., Depository Trust Co. and SIAC) would use this node in the WTC for access to recovery capabilities outside the city was not thought so naive at the time, since no one thought that the sub-basement of the WTC would eve be as vulnerable as it ultimately proved to be — not with its thirty feet of steel-reinforced concrete walls from an earlier fuel tank that was used by the long-defunct Trans-Hudson RR, which served as its outer perimeter. Much less, that the site would ever be hit by terrorist attacks, not once, but twice.