Last week I had the chance to travel with a client to a potential data center location near Houston, Texas. I didn’t realize that the data center was not in Houston proper, so we ended up taking a car ride for about 90 minutes out of Houston to get to the location. Much to my surprise, the trip ended as we rolled up in Bryan, Texas.
Bryan, TX
The picture I snapped with my BlackBerry hardly does it justice, but this sleepy little town is home to about 65,000 people and has grown dramatically over the last 30-40 years because of the rapid growth of nearby Texas A&M. Also, because of the university and its convenient proximity to railroad right of ways that pass through the city, this town also happens to be a crossroads for major telecom trunks for all the major carriers.
Due to a fortuitous combination of bandwidth, low cost power, and location inland far enough to be out of hurricane risk, this town also happens to be the home of Fibertown – a world-class, Tier 4 data center of impressive design. Housed in an old Woolworth’s building and build literally on top of the local bomb shelter, this is one of the most impressive feats of engineering that I’ve ever seen. From the street you have no idea what this plain white and unassuming building holds, although if you could see the multiple train diesel engines on the roof you might suspect that something was up. Resident in that facility is a service provider with rack space to spare and a brand new installation of Dell, Cisco, and Compellent fully loaded with the newest VMWare virtualization products.
After the tour we walked across the street to Mr. G’s Pizzeria – an adorable Italian restaurant where we were served by Mr. G himself. Mr. G is rumored to be a reformed opera singer, although he did not grace us with a performance. His personal office occupies one corner of the place with papers piled in great stacks. Absolutely adorable.
Definitely not what I expected when we got there, and I’m hoping to get back there again some day.
