Interactive Data Completes Expansion In Boxborough
Photo/Eileen Kennedy
Kevin Strong, director of the Boxborough data center of Interactive Data.
Information on more than 6 million securities streams through Interactive Data Corp.’s data centers, including its recently expanded East Coast facility in Boxborough.
The company provides financial market data and analysis to banks, securities firms, money managers and mutual funds around the world. Just this summer the company finished work on a 3,600-square-foot expansion.
“Our systems have to maintain 100 percent up time and have high reliability,” said Kevin Strong, director of the Boxborough data center on Codman Hill Road.
“Our customers are very dependent on a high level of performance by Interactive Data.”
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When Interactive Data decided to move its Waltham data center in 2003, it chose the Boxborough building because of lower rents and a great telecommunications system infrastructure, which it has improved upon.
“It’s not really near anything, but it’s accessible from everywhere,” Strong said.
The building, a former Digital Equipment Corp. data center, already had large generators behind it that made it easy for Interactive Data to put in new ones.
Its recent upgrade and expansion in Boxborough is a study in redundancy. But that’s the point in a data center, particularly for one that supports round the clock businesses.
If certain parts of a cooling or power loop go bad, the system can be shifted to parallel systems, and uninterruptable power supplies are in place in case of emergencies, such as December’s ice storm.
“We were out for 36 hours, but our customers never knew a thing,” Strong said. Interactive Data used the uninterruptable power supplies, with the generator and backup batteries, and all went smoothly.
Interactive Data started off in Boxborough with a 6,000-square-foot data cent.
Since then it added on another 2,400 square feet before adding another 3,600 this year.
Energy efficiency is important these days, so during its most recent upgrade, Interactive Data chose chillers that partially use outside air when the outside temperature is 10 or more degrees colder than internal temperatures, and shifts to using only outside air when the temperature difference is 27 degrees lower outside than inside.
An unbelievable amount of materials were used for the project: more than 9 miles of one-inch cable, more than 8 miles of half-inch cable, more than 2 miles of PVC pipe and galvanized steel electrical tubing.
It also had a construction crew of about 70 workers on site, and at one point had a high of 25 electricians to run all the wiring, Strong said.
The Boxborough data center is supported by a number of data centers around the world, including centers in California, London, Frankfurt and Australia.
And Interactive Data is a publicly-traded company based in Bedford, with 2.400 workers worldwide.
Sixty-five of them work in Boxborough, 400 in Bedford and 45 in Boston.
Interactive Data’s 2008 revenues were $750.5 million, and the company is the world’s third-largest market data provider, behind Thomson-Reuters and Bloomberg LP, according to company officials.
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