Data centers play a big part in the businesses of Thomson Reuters, Legal. But they were built not just for our business needs, they also provide some creative and innovative solutions with the cities and utilities with which we do business when the demand for power is high.
In an article in Network World, Rick King, global head of technology and operations, says a load-shedding agreement with Dakota Electric – the local utility for our Eagan, Minn. headquarters – allows us to go on diesel generators for certain periods of time when the utility can use the help:
“We do a lot of a long-range planning with the utility company. It knows [our long-term plans], and can meet our needs. And we, of course, want to keep costs down so anything we can do to keep the utility from having to build more power-generation capability is good.”
The article with King is titled “Thomson Reuters generates savings.” It also highlights the growth of our legal businesses and how the three data centers in Minnesota are equipped to handle the demand for the information we provide:
In the Eagan data centers, which total 100,000 square feet of raised floor area, Thomson Reuters supports the massive information databases required by its global legal business, as well as portions of its tax and accounting, scientific, healthcare and miscellaneous other businesses.
For example, the company serves about 30,000 users concurrently searching for information across its 32,000 Westlaw legal databases. Westlaw handles some 1.1 million searches daily, King says. The underlying systems supporting those searches generate about 125 million requests a day and pull out 3.5 million documents per hour, he adds.
Content grows constantly. “We’re continually adding more content to Westlaw — historical content, new content, new court decisions, for example,” King says. “And that often means adding more servers and storage.”
Again, you can read the entire article in Network World.
Posted by Kevin Hunt in:
Company Current | In the News |
