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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 -
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.
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."
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!