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Cisco, EMC Team with MIT to Launch $100M Green Data Center

The city of Holyoke, with its ready source of cheap, relatively clean hydroelectic power, will host a new, energy efficient data center that will bring innovation and jobs to the city.

The city of Holyoke, with a ready source of cheap, relatively clean hydroelectic power, will host a new, energy efficient data center that will bring innovation and jobs to the city.

The data center will be managed and funded by the four main partners in the facility: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cisco Systems, the University of Massachusetts and EMC.

While the project is just at the launch of a 120-day planning phase, there are big hopes for the facility. "The potential for breakthrough technologies and research is enormous, and both the center and collaboration will undoubtedly serve to lift up the City of Holyoke and regional economies throughout Western Massachusetts," governor Deval Patrick said.

And Holyoke's mayor, Michael J. Sullivan, told The Republican newspaper, "It's going to be huge.... It's the biggest news for Holyoke for the last 50 years."

In addition to being the hub of a community-redevelopment project, the facility, if and when it is finished, will be a high-performance computing environment that will help expand the research and development capabitilities of the companies and schools that work there.

The new project was announced just weeks after IBM broke ground on a similar public-private data center partnership. That facility, on the Syracuse University campus, will 50 percent less energy than a data center of its size built to standard specifications.

And hydroelectric power has long been a draw for big tech projects like the Holyoke facility, although rarely in as urban a setting as Holyoke -- the city is 10 miles outside Springfield, Mass., and is just 90 miles from Boston. Google's "Project 02," a code name for its massive data center in The Dalles, Ore., was sited in that location because of the cheap and abundant energy from a nearby hydroelectric plant. And last year, Microsoft was reportedly looking to site a data center near Quincy, Wash., and its nearby hydroelectric facility.

Dam photo CC-licensed by Flickr user Ontario Power Generation.

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