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Data Center Resurrected in Downtown Brewery Blocks Posted on August 22, 2012
August 22, 2012 – The national economy is still dragging. Oregon’s unemployment rate is up to 8.7 percent. And the Portland housing market is slumping again. But Eric Hulbert sounds like the dotcom boom is beginning all over again. Hulbert is chief executive officer of Opus Interactive, a data center looking for new clients. He is leasing space for search engine, social media and other Internet-reliant telecommunication companies. “The economy is picking up and businesses are deciding that if they want to grow with it, they need to make some decisions now about who is providing services for them — their own in-house IT (information technology) departments, which are expensive, or someone like us, who can do the same thing for less,” Hulbert said. Hulbert is not alone is saying the demand for data centers is growing. The Wall Street Journal reported Aug. 16 that the Silicon Valley and other tech centers in California are booming again. Big companies like Apple, Google and Facebook are in the news for planning additional large facilities in Central Oregon. And three new data centers are in the works in Hillsboro. But Hulbert’s facilities are in downtown Portland, on the third and fourth floors of a building in the Brewery Blocks, the five-block redevelopment project by Gerding Edlen development company that began in the early 2000s. That doesn’t mean Opus Interactive is thinking small, however. The two floors include 40,000 square feet of hosting space. Hulbert said when it is fully occupied with racks of servers and related equipment, the center will consume enough electricity to power up to 150,000 homes. “That’s a lot of power, it really is,” Hulbert said during a tour of the center last week. In fact, the two floors were originally designed to be a data center. They sat largely empty after the first dotcom bubble burst just as the project was completed. Hulbert is convinced the time is right to make them work like they were intended. “Part of the fun of this is finishing a project that was started over 10 years ago,” he said. Massive electrical cables Most Brewery Block residents, business owners, workers and visitors probably have no idea that a data
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