The Data Center Journal

The Data Center Journal has a long history dating back nearly twenty years, starting as an online and print magazing covering the entire data center industry. Starting late 2020, we added tools and statistical information to help people make better choices, including data center locations, fiber cable routing, and choosing content delivery networks. We created our data center location information from a variety of online sources, with the intention of producing informative internet research pieces and tools. Starting with basic and quite messy data, we refined missing details by hand, geocoded address information into coordinates, and combined with building outlines. All this information is then loaded into a geospatial-aware database, capable of producing both static and interactive mapping elements. This is how are able to calculate building footprint sizes for individual data center facilities and data center providers alike. The next step for The Data Center Journal is to work with internet providers and their dark and lit fiber cable route information. While details of these routes is often available publicly, the data is in any one of a number of formats - shapefiles to KML to GeoJSON to WKT to PDFs drawn by hand! - and spread far and wide over the internet in many separate websites. The Data Center Journal is actively collecting this information, and creating free tooling to help guide consumer and business choices.