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The Soaring Costs for New Data Center Projects
miller60 writes "The cost of building a quality data center is rising fast. Equinix will spend $165 million to convert a Chicago warehouse into a data center, while Microsoft is said to be shopping Texas sites for a massive server farm that could cost as much as $600 million. Just three years ago, data centers were dirt cheap due to a glut of facilities built by failed dot-coms and telcos like Exodus, AboveNet and WorldCom. Those sites have been bought up amid surging demand for data storage, so companies needing data center space must either build from scratch or convert existing industrial sites. Microsoft and Yahoo are each building centers in central Washington, where cheap hydro electric power from nearby dams helps them save on energy costs, which can be enormous for high-density server installations."
Some of these firms should really start looking at warehouses in Detroit. If you can secure the facility properly, you can get TONS of old warehouses and factory floors for very little. Look at the conversion that Wayne State did with techtown - they converted an old abandoned warehouse into usable high-tech space (and the real estate was virtually free).
- tom -
I have to call bull****.
Sure, you can spend whatever you want, but should you?
If you are playing in this space it seems profitable. FTA "generate approximately $80 million in annual revenue, and cash gross profit margins of approximately 70 percent."
So, spend 2 years of revenue in construction, reap great profits over it's 10-12 year minimum life.
In the finest of Slashdot traditions I'm speaking from barely informed ignorance here:
It seems to me you can control your costs by buying existing space, like a mothballed factory, in an economically depressed area. Like, say, anywhere in the rust belt. You've got a bit of flexibility in siting as long as you can get Internet pipes, and you don't necessarily *have* to set up in an area known for a workforce with a high degree of tech skill (and absurd prevailing wages along with almost certainly having higher cost of everything because its metropolitan).
Our technology incubator in Japan is in a park with a few major data centers and is located 40 miles from the middle of nowhere. The US analog would be siting the datacenter in a cornfield in central Illinois. We have (comparitively) cheap power rates, a cost of living (and prevailing salaries) a fraction of that in Nagoya, and the rent (heavily subsidized by local government, which may not be an option for folks discussed in these articles) is a song.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I work for a large financial institution.
We have a LOT of data...and not just account data.
Back in the 80's, the standard was two mainframes in the same room, back-up
tapes kept on and off site, and a contract with a company to supply a DR computer
if it was ever needed.
Cut to 2006...
We have dual fully redundant data centers, each with many mainframes, and pipes
big enough to drive a dump truck full of bits between the two.
A third one is about to open and a fourth is under construction.
Most of this is for SOX.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
for getting a job in the public sector in central washington...
Hopefully they don't get tax abatements as well and don't pay for the privilege of setting up shop there.
Sure seems like Savvis would be a likely pickup for Microsoft of Google.
They have lots of data centers, are just about profitable off income, its like
FREE BEEF, you buy them and the fascilities are paying for themselves.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=svvsd
Cheaper than building your own, and they come with good people, a solid
backbone, and locations that are running NOW.
Buy what the hell do I know, I am a software geek...
I grew up in Moses Lake, WA, which is about 30 miles SE of Quincy. This should be going into Moses Lake, but it isn't. We have goddamn fiber optics laid all over that town (and the county, exempting Quincy due to some sort of contract the PUD had with Verizon, I believe) going right up to people's houses. I enjoyed a 100Mbps symmetric connection for a while...then my bandwidth got capped. In fact, the PUD is charging the service providers so damn much for bandwidth, some have to cap it at 1Mbps down/512Kbps up. That's slower than fucking DSL and Cable! The local PUD is sitting on a fucking GOLDMINE and they're not doing a goddamned thing about it! They could have easily wooed MS and Yahoo into Moses Lake to build their datafarms there using the PUD's fiber network through the local providers (the PUD can't sell service, so they sell the use of the network to ISPs) and made things better in the town. But they're not doing shit. They haven't been doing much to promote, pitch, or package it for big guys to come in and build a major server farm out here. It pisses me off to no end to see those fuckers doing so little to help that town, and it needs all the help it can get. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!
The Westin Building (no not THAT office space) still has plenty of space, including the entire 5th floor!
Actually, there are two huge datacenters in the middle of the corn in Central Illinois... State Farm's and Caterpillar's...
It's probably due to the fact that pretty much all of Texas is wired for oodles of bandwidth, there is very little inclement weather there, tech workers are a dime a dozen, and there are less taxes in Texas, which would attract all those tech workers who are a dime a dozen. Likewise, several large players in the telecom and high-end server market have major presence there. It's not hard at all to figure out why they are scoping Texas. It's cheaper.
Not to mention the whole NCSA thing. Not quite a datacenter, unless you are a researcher in which
case it very much is.
Why not build your datacenter in alaska where it's colder year round. I'd have thought building the thing in Texas would just help pump up your A/C costs.
For now. Over time, as more investment pours in, everything gets more expensive, profits go up, taxes go up, salaries go up. But it does help ease the pain of initial development, I guess.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The cost of turning that into a safe datacenter environment would be enormous. When was the last time you heard of a abandoned factory being built to hold a temperature controlled environment? The costs that go into making a real datacenter are significant, and building the place from scratch for that purpose can be cheaper. Building a datacenter right downtown is a stupid idea, but that doesn't make building it out in the boonies a good one.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
You liberal nutjobs never give up do you? Gates is a democrat not a republican, what makes you think Bush would do anything for him? Continue with your loony conspiracy theories though, maybe they'll keep you warm at night.
Ignorance indeed. The point is simple. Above all else, you want to minimize the hazards to your datacenter. Detroit has been known to have icestorms and blizzards. Heartland corn fields have tornados. Add hurricanes on the southeast coast and a whole range of natural disasters on the west coast and it is apparent why you make your choices. The last thing any major internet company wants is for the roof of the data center to collapse under the weight of an ice storm or be torn off by a twister because in exchange for a few million saved you lose your entire capital investment not to mention truck loads of data and capacity.
Yeah, but if you know what the risks are, you can plan for them. It may be worth reinforcing the building to handle a direct tornado strike (reinforced concrete, anyone?) if the power and personnel costs are low enough. California has earthquakes, but there are still quite a few data centers (and high tech companies) located there. They simply take the risks into account in the financial equation and either accept the cost of that risk or take precautions to protect against it.
Nah, I'm probably just being a consipiracy nerd. It's clearly just sheer coincidence.
No, you are being a conspiracy twit. And it's not like Texas is just some run-down oil and cattle bubba hub. Ever heard of Texas Instruments? Or maybe Dell? Or big hosting operations like Data Return? The tax situation there is favorable, they don't have the incredibly high cost of living that you find in the Seattle, or Boston, or San Fransisco, or Northern Virginia areas... there's plenty of reasons to run a business unit in Texas. And I can think of a lot of reasons why places like WA or OR are overtly hostile to employers and short on places to house employees at anything like a livable rate. The question isn't "why not in WA?" - the question is, "why would they choose to put new operations in an unexpandable, crazy-cost-of-living area like the Pacific NW?"
I say this while living in the DC area - another spot that you'd have to be insane to build a new datacenter in. I've got all of my stuff parked at an Exodus->Cable & Wireless->SAVVIS facility, and there's simply no more room for more of the same.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
is to wait until this new tech bubble bursts and get Super-Amazing Data Roxors TM for a fraction of the price. Seriously. The future is going to have so much storage and computing power for so damn cheap, it makes me feel a little something funny inside. Is this what they call "Love"?
Forget the warehouse walls and ceiling. Pick a large one and build your data centre as a complete building within it. Use the slab only, and post furtive-looking plain clothes guards at the outside warehouse walls to help blend in to the surroundings (STCA).
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Wow... Blizzards and icestorms... I wonder where Russians and Canadians put their datacenters.
A lot more than 2 -- There's a shitload of companies with op centers in the Chicago suburbs (probably was corn fields when they built the places).
I wonder if anyone has run feasibility studies on building datacenters in abandoned underground facilities? They're naturally temperature-controlled: anything more than a few feet down is going to hover around 40-50F, really the only problem you'd have is the possible humidity. But last time I saw specs on servers, they're fine to about 80% RH. You'd obviously have to be very careful about possible flooding issues if it was in an area prone to that, but overall I think you could make use of a lot of old industrial space, reduce or eliminate most cooling costs, and rent out aboveground space to other uses to reduce overhead.
It doesn't even have to be deep, salt-mine type underground: any old building with a sub-basement, or built partially into a hill with a basement, would do fine. There are quite a few old buildings in cities that were built with storage tunnels and cellars that would be suitable, built before the 'truss-and-curtainwall on concrete slab' style of industrial building had become the norm.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As we know worker moral is important, and considering the traditional living arrangements of your standard computer geek, it stands to reason that they should build their data center in the most awesome basement ever built! Hey, one can dream can't he? To the batcave!
Like I said: I live in Japan. We're the earthquake capital of the world, and yet somehow we manage to have buildings stay standing. Many of them also contain computers or millions of dollars of capital, strange as this may be. I trust that the folks living in Iowa and Detroit have figured out some combination of construction techniques, building codes, and insurance schemes which enables their cities to be something other than windswept wastelands. I mean, how long has the auto industry put billion-dollar factories in Detroit? And how many times have you seen GM say "Aww shootskie, we forgot about the ice storms and now three production lines are buried under 400 tons of collapsed roof and snow?"
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Actually your not that far off the mark. Building a data center basically comes down to five key components:
1. Getting lots of cheap power. Being next to a power plant with tons of extra capacity doesn't hurt. The farther you are, the more loss, and that means more $$$ per MW.
2. Internet pipes. Having X thousand servers up and running with nowhere to push the bits is pretty useless. I'm not sure if most people understand how hard it is to say get 40-60 Gig of bandwidth to the middle of nowhere. It takes months, if not years, to put in the right infrastructure. If you think I'm lying, call up say, Sprint and ask them for a 10GE pipe to the middle of Iowa but be careful, thier laughter might hurt your ears.
3. Cheap labor. Gotta have bodies to run everything from cooling to electric to security. You could do it with Robots, but after a while, as with all robots, they want to kill.
4. Favorable tax status. When you install hundreds of millions of dollars of hardware in one place, the amount of taxes you pay on it becomes non trivial. Many companies work out sweet tax deals with the local governments for just this reason. Basically the conversation goes, "You give us cheap tax treatment, we give you 500 jobs."
5. And of course, cheap land. Pretty self explanitory.
Because of small number of sites that are favorable in all these ways, I'm not surprised that costs have increased. But like all things this will change. Places with the last 3 bullets will build out power and connectivity and the datacenters will pop up all over the midwest. Either there or we'll outsource them to India.
ez
Texas is actually the center of the universe for dedicated servers. You've got The Planet, EV1Servers, Rackspace, VeriCenter, Collocation Solutions, SoftLayer, Layered Technologies ... the list goes on. It's pretty amazing.
1. Access to a large body of water cuts costs immensely when dumping the heat from the beast. Fresh is preferred but not required.
2. Access to high voltage lines, or a short distance to one that can be tied into. 34.5 and 105kV lines are expensive to build and maintain on a long-term basis.
3. Access to fuel. Ideally rail, ship, or pipeline, because power plants burn massive quantities of fuel. Trucks do not cut it unless the distance is extremely short.
I recently worked at a power station that was originally built with none of these things. The only people to ever make any money from this white elefant were the contracters that built it.
Build your datacenter near a large body of water (or maybe in Juneau?). Build it near a power station (or build your own steam plant?). Build near some big strands of fiber. Being in the middle of nowhere for the sake of being in the middle of nowhere only profits the contractors.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
my plan on building a data center as a business.
It's incredibly uninformed to talk of costs in terms of total dollars!
The old metric was in $/sq. ft., and today it is better to talk in terms of $/kW given higher densities.
For a wide range of data centers, the building shell cost is around $100-250/sq. ft. An enterprise (EIA 692 "Tier 4") data center costs about $22k/kW, plus the high end of the building shell cost. A "Tier 3" data center is closer to $20k/kW and $200/sq. ft. When you drop to Tier 2, you cut the cost in about half, at $12k/kW.
The only costs that have risen dramatically recently are generators and copper, which have a one-year lead time for big engines typically used (1.5-2+ MW) for the generetor, and about triple the cost three years ago for copper-- maybe a 15% premium maximum for a large data center.
Costs get much more complicated when you talk about provisions for future expansion and site constraints.
As for energy costs, yes, cheaper electricity is good for a data center. A 2MW data center will save about $350k/year if they can drop their electricity cost by $0.01 per kWh!
People pick Chicago because virtually all the countries long haul fiber runs right through the loop. Equinix ORD is located on the south edge of the loop, and is in a great position to get fiber from every major carrier. I work for a company that rents a huge amount of space from Equinix (the most behind IBM, who rents ~50% of the ORD space), and we are starving for more Datacenter space and power. With the new DC they are building, we hope to acquire atleast 500 or more cabinets for our future expansion...
This is all so true. I work in the Ashburn, VA Equinix facility and any company I associate with is unable to expand location. Equinix is planning new building after new building but they cant keep up - and this requires time and money.... and unfortunately, this is something Equinix does not have. The cost of living here in Northern VA is outrageous. .... On the flip side tho ....
There is no better place to be at when looking at network performance. If every major tier 1 and tier 2 provider is in the northern VA area (and most likely inside Equinix at some point), you eliminate your customer's data backtracking. When I lived in Pittsburgh, many traceroutes that I performed routed to Ashburn/Dulles/DC and then back to somewhere in PA. Instead of placing your infrastructure in PA so that some PA data has to travel twice as long, you put it where everyone meets. If your just a small hosting company, this is not a huge issue but if your an enterprise fortune 1000 company this is a huge issue in your performance and your network costs.
Granted, if Texas starts building up more and more, then every backbone provider would flock to that area -- but then again, the entire Northern VA area used to be nothing more than farms as little as 10 years ago. With that in mind, how long would Texas stay the way it is now?
Actually, most factories are already temperature controlled environments. Industrial processes like steel smelting, injection molding, etc... generate quite a bit more heat than even the largest datacenters.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The question isn't "why not in WA?" - the question is, "why would they choose to put new operations in an unexpandable, crazy-cost-of-living area like the Pacific NW?"
Cheap power and land. Clearly you haven't been to central WA. It's empty.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
They're naturally temperature-controlled: anything more than a few feet down is going to hover around 40-50F
Yeah, sure, until you saturate the heat capacity of the ground around you. Mind, the ground conducts slowly, and datacenters have a lot higher power density than your basement.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
outsource the data warehousing to another country
here in egypt, electricity, water and petrol is cheap in comparison to other countries. datalinks are (according to my isp) via submarine cables, satellite and redundant submarine cables to to american and europe.
AND there are free tax zones to build in too.
only problem? the isps here have not interconnected themselves to each other meaning to go from isp A to isp B the packet must travel to europe/american first - and yes i dont know the technical term for this agreement.
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
Same is true of The Planet, a datacenter in Dallas.
I'm sure we all know more than one site hosted there!
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Microsoft is not the measure of things, especially not of spending.
That Microsoft spends $600 million on a datacenter is not because they need to,
it is because they can.
I'm sure that the recent expansion of the Yakima NSA listening center just down the street is only a coincidence.
I love this cycle, where internet business heats up and companies start building datacenters to keep up with perceived demand. It happened the last time around, with companies like Exodus, Cable & Wireless, and all the others who were overbuilt when demand didn't materialize.
Anything over 50k sf of datacenter is more than enough, assuming you've got cheap and available power, and close to a couple fiber loops. The big reason that these new datacenters are so large (200k-400k sf, compared that to 1 floor of a high rise office at 30k sf) is because they aren't allowed to have the power density (elec co can only supply so much at reasonable price). With servers more power hungry, yet smaller, there's a need for more power/cooling, but less space.
Building new isn't all that different in cost of retrofitting an old warehouse. I'd just buy one of the small operators out there and be up and running for a % of the cost. The problem there is that there's a company called Digital Realty Trust buying all a lot of the datacenters in the market, and they've got a ton of cash.
So maybe the rust belt should be fighting for these developments, but they can't overcome 1 issue - companies want to be close to their datacenter. It goes against the security mission, the cost justification, and just about everything else; but these always get built right next to corporate HQ or in some metropolitan area. Doh!
Why cut IT when your office space costs $3/sf? gibso
Equinix is insanely expensive. I considered moving my company's colocation into Equinix's Ashburn VA facility but I ended up choosing more space at two others for half the price. Equinix has a beautiful place but I can't for the life of me figure out who actually needs biometric locks on the cages. That stuff isn't cheap.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The cost of building out datacentres has been soaring for several reasons, the first real issue is being able to provide enough power for todays power hungry servers to run at any sort of density required to actually churn the data. We see datacentres only able to offer very low amount of power per square meter in the UK, which is very low and can often only provide you with upto 4 quad processor XEON servers per rack. When you can only have that density the cost is much greater. The other aspect is how do you cool it, the traditional airconditioning raised floor method really does not work as its almost impossible to actually cool where you have to cool and there will always be hot spots even if your doing warm row cold row designs etc. Its important to seal the cool air in and funnel it to where its needed. APC have recently been working heavily in this area and claim to be able to cool MASSIVE amounts of density. The other issue is the management aspects of these datacentres. In the past you could design a datacentre to be good for 5-10 years now its hard to design something which will be good for the same length of time becaues the power requirements, cooling and power grid is something that is often over utilised (as per in the UK datacentre market).
This is the price of AJAX. If users are constantly going back to the server in the middle of a page, you need more server capacity. Really, the AJAX approach is a hideously inefficient way to update a form. We're now seeing the price of that.
it just seems that way after the big Pentium D migration.
If you think
French Iliad SAS (the parent company of the ISP Free) just started a cute server renting business in a former Exodus datacenter.
The point of interest is that servers are fanless, built on low-consumption VIA processors, and consume about 20W/server.
That should make the cost of operation much lower than traditional hosting...
See details on http://www.dedibox.fr/index.php?rub=offre (in french)
Pictures of the datacenter: http://www.dedibox.fr/index.php?rub=datacenter
Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective
A long time. Texas goes on and on and on and on and [...] on and on and on. And on a bit more. It's further from El Paso to Texarkana than it is from El Paso to Los Angeles. The population density is very low in Texas - a population of 20 million, and half of that is in Houston and the Dallas/Fort Worth areas (5 million in the greater Houston area, and the DFW area also having 5 million) leaving most of the rest of the state (which is the size of France) pretty much empty.
The growth seems to be happening in the big metropolitan areas - but Houston has so much space to expand into, the expansion is basically going on unchecked because there's little to stop it. This is not necessarily a good thing. I used to live in Houston (and didn't mind it too much) - but I don't think I'd want to live there now with all the characterless sprawl of McMansions and strip malls that's going on now.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Everything is cheaper in India. Then build out sufficient bandwidth to connect everything here to there. See it's not just about pesky American wages - it's also about pesky American real estate prices, utility costs and whatnot.
Just out of curioisity, how exactly did you get started in Japan?
Monstar L
The cost of turning that into a safe datacenter environment would be enormous. When was the last time you heard of a abandoned factory being built to hold a temperature controlled environment?
oh for crying out loud. It amazes me the lack of thought outside the box people have.
Options...
1 - spend very little and build seperate enclosures inside the wearhouse that hold the libert units for environment control and the servers in data-center pods.
2 - go uber cheap. Buy a bunch of camper trailers that are gutted and put the servers inside those parked in the wearhouse. works great and I have seen several startups that did exactly that. this also works very well for rental property as you can pull up stakes and move your datacenter within minutes of getting your data pipes into another cheap wearhouse.
the best option and the one usually does in these types of datacenters is the first. you can hire simple general contractors to build interior walls with roofs that are only 10 feet high and insulate the crap out of them to make the perfect datacenter within 5 - 30 days.
It's the mentially retarted CEO's and Venture Capilolists that think you need to spend 80 million dollars on a flashy facility with lots of glass and artwork and special "touches" that only impress clients that will never go there or see it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Cave systems have the advantage that you can shunt air *out* very easily, and incoming air is usually coming from elsewhere in the system where it is already cool. Hollow out and reinforce some caverns properly, stick some nice big fans on an exit, and you're onto a winner.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Clearly a case of Intelligent Design.
From a building perspective, that can possibly make sense. However, you would also want power from multiple substations for reliability. That could also be possible, but likely very expensive out in the middle of nowhere. But the hard thing would likely be network connectivity. Finding a high speed uplinks out in the middle of a corn field is going to be difficult. Find multiple ones would be near impossible. What you save by reusing an old building or through cheap "rent" would be ofset by the huge cost of setting up and maintaining electrical and network connectivity.
Why the comments as if Iowa was some backwards unwired wasteland? Working in eastern Iowa, we have a number of excellent datacenters that have just as much capacity as elsewhere. Inquire about a rack in Cedar Falls, Iowa and compare it to Equinix in Chicago. Not even in the same ballpark. But in Cedar Falls, I'm still on Internap as well as connections to MAE West. With a much lower cost of business than some metro areas, I'm surprised more people haven't located here.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
A lot of buildings in downtown Toronto are being cooled by lake (bottom) water now, aren't they?
The problem is you'll be adding heat to that environment, and you have to move it back out. That's harder if you have to duct that heat up to the surface. However, underground has advantages that are very compelling to those of us currently working in data centers on the 11th floor in a hurricane zone.
No, sorry - - if the Detroit and Wayne County politicians found out how much your little operation was worth, they'd soon be taxing it 37 different ways. SE Michigan is in a death spiral for many reasons; that's one of them.
I know you were speaking figuratively, but near Detroit, it's more of an East-West move. Detroit is actually NW of Windsor and going straight North puts you in Lake Huron. You want to go Southeast through the tunnel or over the bridge to Windsor.
I've seen a number of conflicting estimates on how much power computers and digital devices use.
One source decries widescreen TVs as the "SUV" of the 21st century . The average plasma TV consumes more power per hour than the average refrigerator, the previous household energy hog.
This comment cuts across several threads on costs.
Costs alone are not enough. What is needed is a unit cost. For example, is unit cost per user rising or falling? If it is falling but the user base is growing rapidly, you are getting a good deal even though costs may be increasing.
Also, things such as redudent server, backups, power backups etc. should probably be counted as an insurance cost and measured against cost of down time. If the cost of downtime increases much faster than the cost of this 'insurance' then you are probably getting a good deal.
To say 'costs are rising' without a benefit analysis is meaningless.
Also, I wonder how much of this is due to bloated apps and poor design (XML anyone?). Is this explosion in servers due to crappy code and bad data models. I suspect some of it is though it has to be looked at on an application-by-application basis.
And while I am on the topic, multi-tier does *not* mean multi server. I have no idea how this myth got started (hardware vendors maybe?). You can, if you like, run all tiers on one server if your code is not leaky. For security reasons you probably should put your web server on its own box, but then if you have 5 tiers and a DB engine there is no reason why a good server can't run all of them in most cases. Unless, of course, the code is crap.
My semi-informed opinion....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Should be using VMware Infrastructure 3 :)
My company is building a new DC in Texas too. We are doing it on our existing campus by gutting and renovating an older building but the costs are still going to be huge.
In the meantime, I've been building one of the first VMware ESX environments our company has ever used. It started out as a simple 6 host server environment but has grown to over 20 DL 580s and 585s hosting hundreds of Virtual Machines. The initial investment is high but the operating costs are lower, the cabling costs are lower, the HVAC costs are lower, and of course, a VMware host server takes up less real estate.
If my company had focused on VMware, or virtualization in general, early on, they wouldn't need three datacenters and they wouldn't be building a fourth.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
And it's not like Texas is just some run-down oil and cattle bubba hub.
But what if the data center has to stay in the U.S.? Corporations are concerned about what's going to happen when we give Texas back to Mexico - provided they want it, of course.
lots of cool ocean water to cool your servers and put up a few megawatt class wind turbines to power the servers and the pumps.
>Like I said: I live in Japan. We're the earthquake capital of the world,
>and yet somehow we manage to have buildings stay standing.
It's not so much the building falling down that I worry about. It's the idiots that don't bother to secure their machines in the racks. Or the ones that leave their cabinets on rollers.
Even if earthquakes aren't a problem, a fairly small tornado could toss around a lot of machines.
Personally, I think most datacenters are waaaay too big. I see an awful lot of empty cabinets here in Austin, TX.
Right-of-way is more important than existing infrastructure.
Just to use a company that's familiar to you as an example, ask the Southern Pacific Railroad Integration.
Many of the heavy manufacturing plants use something like 440V three phase to power huge motors continuously, is a 34.5kV really necessary if a manufacturing plant didn't have the need?
But what if the data center has to stay in the U.S.? Corporations are concerned about what's going to happen when we give Texas back to Mexico - provided they want it, of course.
Why would they want it? If they start running it, everyone there will just want to sneak into Arkansas, Omaha, or Arizona to get away from the same BS that keeps Mexico the way it is now. But the real question is, what happens when the Mexicans apoligize on behalf of the Spanish, and then give Mexico back to what's left of the native tribes? That could hardly be worse than what the current (or any recent) government there is doing.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Many of the heavy manufacturing plants use something like 440V three phase to power huge motors continuously, is a 34.5kV really necessary if a manufacturing plant didn't have the need?
He's talking about the primaries that come in. Not the stepped-down voltages that things actually run at. The transmission voltage on the primaries has a lot more to do with how far away from the substation/power generating plant your building is than how much power you need.
I don't know how much power a couple of electric smelters use, but I can tell you that a blade server farm can take some serious power and space. Most 200+ watt per square foot datacenters have MORE utility space per square foot than datacenter space (meaning you need a foot and a half or two sq. feet of space outside your climate controlled area to power and cool each sq. ft. of your datacenter). This equipment, plus the equipment inside uses massive amounts of power. A 60,000 square foot datacenter can consume 150,000 square feet of space and 20,000 kilowats of power, most of that at 208v. To supply the transformers with that kind of power requires a hell of a big set of primaries.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/14 741940.htm?source=rss&channel=miamiherald_local/
You have a point. Perhaps we could sell Texas on e-bay.
Sam Palmisano, CEO, Chairman and Chief Poobah of IBM recently went to India and announced with the President of India, they're pouring $6 billion US into the country there and that IBM India would soon have more employees than every other country including the US. Now it's #2 after the US. You can also expect to see stockholder's meetings there to emphasize the importance of India and the Asian markets.
Like I said: I live in Japan. We're the earthquake capital of the world, and yet somehow we manage to have buildings stay standing.
Yeah, but one giant lizard and Boom!.
It is not an abandoned underground facility if he is still living there.
Perhaps... but, if you wanted to try, it looks like GOOG is hiring:
a nswer=32114
http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?
There's also tornadoes. And hail. And the even earthquakes, eventually.
So yeah, I don't think we should short Detroit. Take the new Detroit airport for example, which is, in my opinion, a good example of a nice construction job. It is 1 mile long, very easy to navigate, with a shuttle running the length. It was a clean and easy migration to the new airport, no baggage or other technical snafus like in Denver, wasn't it. Now, I'm not sure of the details, but obviously Michigan had the vision and the skills to get the job done or find the right people.
As an aside, it is interesting to compare this airport with Logan Airport in Boston, which seems in a perpetual state of repair, like a building in, say Soviet Russia. They have the technical capability (Rte 128, MIT, Harvard, etc), why can't they build an airport? The "Big Dig" seems to be another fiasco, certainly as far as cost and planning.
Anyway, yes, they can certainly figure out how to build a data center in either of those places, probably Boston too, and in fact there are probably many smaller datacenters there to begin with, all with Disaster Recovery plans, etc.
I wuz modded troll. Woohoo! I was hoping for Flamebait.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
One of the benifits of a warehouse for a datacenter is that you can put the large systems in easily. Also backup power, fuel storage etc is not a big problem either. In Mumbai India ICICI Bank converted a cannery into a very large datacenter with all the trimmings. You slashdot people have to really understand the the US is not the center of the world. Just overpriced! I have seen datacenters built in just about any and all locations. At Reliance in Mumbai they built their datacenter in an old building also, they had no idea of what equipment they were going to purchase so the built a generic datacenter that would support any and all types of equipment (Hardware), it was pretty slick. In Manila I have seen Hardware hoisted up elevator shafts 5 or 6 stories trying to make this big iron fit into the datacenter. The best location for datacenters are ones where it is possible to support and install the planned equipment. All the other costs are actually incidental. Walls are easy, networks, AC etc. NO big deal. In Hong Kong I installed a server in an EQINOX datacenter and asked why the water pipes were in the Datacenter, I saw no Gas. They said their standard for fire suppression was Water, I was totally blown away, never saw it. Mitsubisi in Thailand's datacenter is right next to the production line and is filty, failures are constant.