Location, Location, Location is key for green data center development, and for office's one of the biggest green efforts is to get people out of their cars and into a location that gets them walking more and the ability to live close to work.
The SeattleTimes.com has a an article about Google's new 1,000 person campus in Kirkland, WA.
The effect may be even more profound this time around because of the business. It's Google.
By early next year, some 195,000 square feet of offices along Sixth Street South, on the site of a former Navy depot and door company, will be occupied by Googleites. They will move into three office buildings in a campuslike setting near downtown Kirkland between Lake Washington and Interstate 405.
The development is expected to have major impacts on both the city and the region.
But the implications of Google's expansion go far beyond numbers of workers, said Ellen Miller-Wolf, Kirkland's economic-development manager.
"It's a really big deal," she said. "It's a change in the way of thinking about Kirkland."
Google's move is a transformative step toward the city's own vision of being a community where people can work, live and play all in the same place, she said, and where people walk more and sit in traffic less.
"Most important in the future of a city like Kirkland is driving foot traffic and downtown activity," said Dave Despard, an IBM vice president and member of the Kirkland Downtown Association. "Our biggest push is to attract and retain this level of employers and employees to the downtown."
The city already has taken steps toward that goal in developing high-density housing, she said. The number of multifamily housing units in the central business district jumped from 39 in 1995 to 1,170 in 2007.
As the Google PR machine works through the positive image of articles like this, let's keep our fingers crossed they figure out a way to work with the press on equivalent articles for Google's data centers.
As more information and solutions move to the cloud, Google needs to create a positive image of its data centers. Secrecy may work if selling to the CIA and DoD, but businesses are going to want to know more information about Google's Data Centers if they are going to move their information in the the Google Cloud. Amazon.com cloud services have been able to sidestep this issue which creates more pressure on Google's PR team.
