Goodbye 111 8th Ave NYC

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If you have ever been a user of hosted PBX service in New York City, there a better than good chance that you were using facilities hosted at 111 8th Avenue. The building, which has been owned by Google since 2010, is the 3rd largest building in New York City, and is  home to myriad telecom and Internet companies because of its proximity to key fiber optic resources.  It is considered one of the premiere carrier hotel facilities in the world and virtually every VoIP provider routes calls through this building in one way or another.   SkySwitch maintained a switch node in 111 8th Ave, as a colocation customer at InterNAP’s 75,000 square foot facility on the 10th floor of the building.

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Despite the massive size of the building, the building has not been able to accommodate all Google’s growing New York employee base (Google rents various other office space throughout the city as a result), and Google has been working hard to terminate the leases of most the tenants as a result.

This past weekend, SkySwitch became the latest casualty of this effort as InterNAP is among the companies evicted by Google (in late 2013, InterNAP informed all of its customers that the 10th floor colocation center  would have to be vacated before September).  As of today, SkySwitch has completed migrating to a new InterNAP facility in Secaucus, New Jersey.  Thanks to our Always Available network architecture, the migration went off without a hitch, and zero downtime for end users.

With a clientele that includes fortune 500 companies, banks and other financial institutions, I can only imagine the countless resources that InterNAP’s  colocation customers will be forced to expend on moving.  For SkySwitch, the process has consumed hundreds of man-hours and several months.

It is comforting to know that Google will at least put the space to good use.   A new floor guide in the elevator lobby seems to indicate that the space will be home to an employees lounge complete with a Central Park Tech Talk auditorium and meeting rooms with names such as Fort Wadsworth, The Highline and Gramercy Park.