Anyone know if the Troy Data Center is still operational?
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The moving of IT equipment to AutoNation is real talk. Why pay for extra space when Eddie can shift money from one pocket to another? It isn't as if Eddie hasn't been trying to sell off these properties while losing billions since about when pterodactyls were still flying around. As a real estate sales guy he's pterrible.
The building is still active. The property is for sale (as are all Transformco properties) and the roof is black. Other than that your comments are pure conjecture.
A serious answer: The building is for sale, so, it is likely not active.
https://transformcoproperties.com/properties/sears-data-center/ (labeled as "Office" but the big generators are a tell-tale for a datacenter).
Looking at the Internet Archive, the page first popped up in December 2020.
Looks like the building was built in 1999. The PUE is unlikely to be competitive on that basis alone. It doesn't help matters that it has an all-black roof (that'll markedly increase cooling costs). All of which could be overcome with renovation, but it is unlikely that happened. Oakland County, MI's electric rates aren't staggeringly high, but better can be found elsewhere in the country.
Based on the above, pretty much any large colocation provider can provide better service at a lower cost than Sears ever could hope to get from their own team in this facility. Bonus points if Sears ever goes into the cloud, but who knows how involved that will be.
In any case given Sears rapid downsizing and the fact that the property is listed for sale it is all but certain that the only relic of the retailer's datacenter operations left there is a plume of diesel fuel that leaked out of some tank years ago into the ground.
I heard everything was being run off an Ubuntu 12.0.4 workstation which is being moved out of Hoffman to the backroom of a local AutoNation dealer.
Even a single Dell computer server is overkill for the current volume of sales produced by Transformco. All it would take now is a guy named Dell, working out of EL's garage with a spiral notebook.
Last I heard, they rightsized Sears's data processing needs to a Dell PowerEdge server that runs in ESL's garage.
Yes, fully operational.
So, nobody really knows. Got it.
Yes!
No