Hello everyone!

I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday season.

I would like to ask everyone for their professional opinions. Your response and opinion means a great deal to me.

I was introduced to a new datacenter company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. They are planning on building 22 new datacenters around the world. The interesting part is they are building them on de-commissioned cargo ships!

The company is called IDS and they are building datacenters on refurbished cargo container ships. These ships will live in port in the their designated cities, and will rely on standard connectivity for power and network.

According to the people I spoke to, their approach lends them 3 distinct advantages over traditional brick and mortar buildings:

1. They will use sea water for their chill water, reducing/eliminating the energy required to maintain appropriate datacenter temperatures.  This allows them to reduce their energy consumption by at approximately 30%.

2. In addition to standard datacenter backup generators, these cargo ships all have standard ship generators that can generate additional power. All generators will have access to the ships fuel storage during disaster scenarios, which allows them to operate for nearly a month without the need to refuel.  Most datacenters measure their backup power duration by days and hours before needing to refuel. Also, they can refuel via the water, which will allow them additional access to bio-diesel and less reliance on fuel companies access to surface streets.

3. They are able to quickly provide large scale real estate in some of the most real estate impacted areas of the country.  They can outfit a ship and have it docked in San Francisco or New York in only a few months. Each ship reportedly has 200,000 sq ft of datacenter space!

They claim that they will have their first 200,000 sq. ft. of space available in San Francisco in the beginning of April 2008 and have already signed some key anchor tenants.

They have had excellent answers to all the questions I threw at them, so I am asking for your help; if any of you have heard anything about IDS, or have questions or concerns about their approach, I would love to hear from you.

They are currently making their way out of stealth mode this month which makes it is very difficult to find information about them at this time.  If any of you are interested in contacting them, let me know and I will be glad to make the introduction.

I look forward to your comments and responses.

Ken