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Advance Consulting <br />Group, Inc. <br />Memo <br />To: Ramsey EDA <br />From: Michael Mulrooney <br />CC: Kurt Ulrich, Patrick Brama <br />Date: 10/3/2012 <br />Re: Data Center Evaluation at Old City Hall Site <br />I have been asked to provide input on the potential fiscal impact of two development options for the Old <br />City Hall site. The options include developing the site as a data center or to continue with a pattern of <br />housing consistent with surrounding land uses. Below is a description of what data centers are and their <br />economic impact. This report will provide the EDA with a comparison between the two alternative types <br />of development if they were to develop at the city hall property. <br />History <br />Data centers have their roots in the huge computer rooms of the early ages of the computing industry. <br />Early computer systems were complex to operate and maintain, and required a special environment in <br />which to operate. Also, a single mainframe required a great deal of power, and had to be cooled to avoid <br />overheating. Security was important — computers were expensive, and were often used for military <br />purposes. Basic design guidelines for controlling access to the computer room were therefore devised. <br />During the boom of the microcomputer industry, and especially during the 1980s, computers started to <br />be deployed everywhere, in many cases with little or no care about operating requirements. However, <br />as information technology (IT) operations started to grow in complexity, companies grew aware of the <br />need to control IT resources. With the advent of client -server computing, during the 1990s, <br />microcomputers (now called "servers") started to find their places in the old computer rooms. The <br />availability of inexpensive networking equipment, coupled with new standards for network structured <br />cabling, made it possible to use a hierarchical design that put the servers in a specific room inside the <br />company. The use of the term "data center," as applied to specially designed computer rooms, started to <br />gain popular recognition about this time. <br />Advance Consulting Group <br />13868 Crane St. NW Andover, MN 553304 <br />