| Our data center is located in the Historic Bryant Building... |
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Located in downtown Kansas City, the Bryant Building is registered as a national historic property. It joined the KC skyline in 1930.
With 13,200 volt 3-phase power supplied by two separate power grids with different transformers, the power supplied to the building is very reliable.
The site has become a "technology hotel", with many technology / communications / fiber optic companies. Including Williams Communications, Cogent Communications, Alltel, and a host of others.
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 | The Bryant Building, located at 1102 Grand Ave, in the heart of downtown Kansas City, Missouri is significant in many respects. First it is architecturally and historically significant and is a landmark in the Kansas City skyline. The 26-story high-rise was built in 1930 and has been home to many influential professionals over the past 75 years.
However the Bryant Building is now significant to Kansas City for a number of 21st century reasons that have less to do with the building itself than with the location of the building in relation to communication infrastructure that lies beneath the city streets. |
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| The Bryant Building is significant to those in the telecommunication industry because of the vast amount of fiber that is located in the street. There are 26 different fiber carriers that have fiber in the street on 11th or Grand and approximately 15 additional carriers within 6 blocks of the Bryant Building. |  |
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 | Because of the extremely high cost to install fiber infrastructure, telecommunication companies desire locations near concentrations of fiber to avoid the cost of installing new fiber and to share networks with other fiber providers. Over the past 12 years, the who's who of the telecommunication industry including Wiltel, MCI, SBC, and Westel, have created data centers in the Bryant Building for this very reason. |
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| These and many other companies have made significant investments in infrastructure in the Bryant Building for telecommunication operations. In the telecommunications industry buildings that house an array of telecommunications companies that share and connect to resources are often called carrier hotels. The Bryant Building has become a carrier hotel as the result of the foresight of the telecommunication company planners that call her home, and because of the concentration of the fiber in the street outside the building. |  |
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Old to New - The Bryant Building was not originally designed to house telecommunication data centers. Telecommunication data centers, or POP's (points of presence) as they are referred to in the industry have many special requirements. First and foremost is reliable and redundant power for equipment. Minutes of downtime can equate to millions of dollars of revenue lost for telecommunication companies. Some have spent millions of dollars in infrastructure in the Bryant to make sure that there is little to no chance of downtime. The second requirement is adequate cooling to cool electronics that have to run 24/7/365.
For large established companies that have adequate resources and can build infrastructure, they have been able to make things work at the Bryant Building. However medium and smaller firms that want to take advantage of the many telecommunications choices and relationships at the Bryant Building have had to deal with inadequacies in power, and cooling issues inherent with a 75-year old building.
The ownership group of the Bryant Building, 1102 Grand LLC, spurred by an original idea offered by Graeme Gibson and with the help of the current tenants, recognized that there was an unfulfilled need to provide network inter-connects, redundant power and cooling for those companies that have the same requirements for customer service uptime but did not have the resources to develop the required infrastructure.
They have been developing and implementing plans to make a number of upgrades to the building, including power upgrades that have already been made, and replacement of the cooling towers, which was just completed March 27th, 2005.
There are a number of other improvements that have been made or are in the process of being made, including: Fiber Vault System - large virtical risers through the building - one with access from Grand Avenue and one with access from 11th St., Video Surveillance Network, Proximity Access Card Control, on demand Custom Data Suites...
Some of these, are reasons why we choose the Bryant Building as the location for our Data Center, the rest of them are ideas we've been pushing for and working with the building on to improve the facilities at our disposal.
For more detailed information about improvements and the facilities at the Bryant Building, take a look at this document. (MS Word 70Kb)
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