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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."
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!!!
Most enterprise customers don't have any interest in sharing a facility with 50 other telecom providers and hosting companies in a carrier hotel like The Westin Building. These companies want big, stand-alone data centers where they can have complete control over access and security. The other issue is that space is limited in telecom hotels like Westin. The Equinix project mentioned in TFA is 225,000 square feet, and the Microsoft requirement is for more than 400,000 square feet. Westin is a large facility, but the fifth floor isn't 200,000 square feet.
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).