Why Portland? Key Considerations for Landing Your IT Infrastructure in the Portland Market

Here’s why the Portland area is a great option when it comes to the location of your infrastructure:

Sales tax advantage – There are no sales taxes in Oregon, so any company that deploys colocation equipment, and any gear they buy in Oregon, isn’t taxed. On average, companies spend $100k to $200k per rack on equipment like servers, storage, network gear and more. So, there’s a cost savings of about 10% when landing infrastructure in Oregon as opposed to California.

Proximity to hyperscalers – Portland is a good location for companies that need low latency access to hyperscalers. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are all within a couple hundred miles of Hillsboro, so you can put workloads in a data center that’s very close to the hyperscalers.

Fiber connectivity – There’s a lot of fiber connectivity in Hillsboro, including subsea cables that go to Asia and the South Pacific. The Flexential Portland – Hillsboro 2 data center is the Network Access Point (NAP) of the Northwest and is one of the most connected data centers as the U.S. point of presence for the New Cross Pacific and Hawaiki transpacific subsea cables.

Low latency – For companies based out of the Bay Area, Portland is just 700 miles away, and roundtrip latency is around 15 milliseconds—which is not enough to matter for most use cases. Portland, with its low risk of earthquakes, is close enough to California to not have latency problems, but far enough away to be a great place for a disaster recovery (DR) site.

Low cost of power – Power costs in Oregon are about 50% lower than in California, making it a desirable and cost-effective option for those looking to relocate their colocation installations. 

There are many data centers in the Hillsboro area, so how do you choose the right one? Look for a provider with an all-encompassing service offering that can support your network connectivity, data protection, disaster recovery and private and public cloud requirements all under one roof.  

Partner with a provider that has a team of personnel in the data center to help customers do the things they need to do from a remote hands standpoint. Find a partner with an in-house professional services team that can help with IT requirements like security, compliance, cloud readiness assessments and cloud migrations. Work with a customer-focused provider with a national platform that can scale as your business scales.

Flexential’s Portland – Hillsboro Data Centers

Flexential was one of the first  providers in the Hillsboro market. It’s had a leading presence in the area for 20 years and will continue to grow alongside its customers there. Flexential’s Hillsboro 2 data center has achieved Tier III certification by the Uptime Institute, the only data center in Hillsboro with that certification.

Flexential’s Hillsboro 3 data center, which will be completed in Fall 2021, will be the largest data center in the state of Oregon, and the largest multi-tenant data hall in North America at 240,000 square feet. The buildings are designed to be high density and can cool workloads up to 50 KW in a single rack with provided containment. Flexential also has plans to bring liquid cooling into Hillsboro 3 for customers who want to be part of the cutting edge with graphics processing units, artificial intelligence and machine learning, all of which require a lot of compute.

Once the Hillsboro 3 data center is complete, Flexential will have three interconnected data centers in the Portland – Hillsboro area. They are part of a national platform that interconnects all of its data centers across 20 markets, from Philadelphia to Phoenix, Portland to Fort Lauderdale, and everywhere in between.