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Microsoft Plans Data Center in Siberia
miller60 writes "Microsoft has announced plans to build a data center in Siberia. The facility near the city of Irkutsk will be able to hold 10,000 servers. Officials in Microsoft's Russian business unit said the region had a stable power supply, and will be able to support a 50 megawatt utility feed. The average winter temperature is below zero in Irkutsk (which is perhaps best known to gamers as a territory in Risk). Microsoft recently announced huge data center projects in Chicago and Dublin, Ireland, and is clearly ramping up its worldwide infrastructure platform as it competes with Google." No doubt this will save a fortune on cooling costs- they can just crack a window.
Get those changes in on time, or its off to the eastern front for you.
Some kidding aside, one chief reason (among others) to have facilities on the other side of the planet is just that - overnight labor capable of delivering a PM customer change request that can be delivered the next morning AM.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
The Canadian prairies can hit those extremes as well. We have lots of server rooms in this area of the world. Considering we've been dealing with these temperature fluxuations for a long time, we've learned how to deal with them. We're warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Its not really that tough. Insulation works both ways.
It's not exactly in the middle of nowhere, though. The city of Irkutsk has a population of approx. 600.000, and the Irkutsk oblast (region) is 2,5 million. So the population (and therefore available workforce) is most certainly there.
Besides, Microsoft already has departments in Russia, so the employees for this data center will probably come mainly from those. Also, comp.sci education in Russian universities has a fairly good reputation, so recruiting new people shouldn't be a problem.
A more obvious site would perhaps have been Novosibirsk (1,4 million), home to Novosibirsk State University -- the science captial of the Soviet Union.
However, I suspect Irkutsk was chosen partly because it is located (more or less) in the middle of Russia -- about halfway from St. Petersburg in the west to Vladivostok in the East -- and because labor is cheaper in Siberia than in Moscow or St.Petersburg.
Granted, the night life is far from what we've come to expect in most of Europe or the US, but there are bars, clubs and even a couple of decent restaurants. I had the best sushi of my life in Irkusk a couple of years ago.
Perhaps the fact that Microsoft has a fairly major office in Fargo, North Dakota is testament to how similar North Dakota is to Siberia.
Both areas share a few commonalities: cheap labor, cheap electricity and rural enough to be isolated from any major events that tend bigger cities tend to be prone to. Microsoft sees this and is using it to their advantage, just like any other company would.
Perhaps. I agree that it seems, re: Moore's Law et al., that a huge infrastructure investment in *boxes and racks* is foolhardy. However, what if the investment is just a placeholder for more valuable enduring capital? If, ten years from now, the limiter is not bandwidth but power consumption (energy crisis?), would it not be a huge advantage to have installations already well-established, and worry about what goes in them as computers become ever more powerful? The jokes about "how about a beowulf cluster of those!" won't be so funny when a company can roll out a massively parallel installation at the drop of the proverbial hat because they already have the power, facility, and distribution infrastructure in place to welcome the next big GHz bump or new computing paradigm.
Also, I imagine that the market in data analysis and search is only just beginning. How much computing power would you need to, say, search all recorded video on the net using a single frame from the video? Could be possible, but man would that be a bitch on processing, back-end. Similar to searching for an image from a fragment of an image. These are the services I expect to see just following along from the paradigm of finding texts from a fragment of text, extrapolated to our other media paradigms.
Think bigger. Imagine a context algorithm that recognizes two-dimensional images as three-dimensional objects, and apply it to an engine that takes a photo of a location and identifies it with that location, based on the items (e.g. landmarks) in that photo. Or a searchable human gene database; (well shit, I didn't know I was Obama's 8th cousin. Does that make Cheney my 14th cousin? I wonder if I have the Republican gene...). Those will be a bitch to back end.
Point being, costs of computing diminish at an accelerated rate, but costs of infrastructure (particularly power) are less plastic. Providing the next big information service will still depend, for consumers, on fast response times, which means a whole new generation of back-end server rack forests. The barriers to entry are having the meatspace brick-and-mortar facilities (with their private roads and power plants), not the computers that go in them. That's why these moves by MS and Google are scary to me.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
In Russia, we felt the same about Nebraska in the US. We heard horrible tales that citizens who do not obey Ronald Reagan (now G.W. Bush), they get sent to exile in Nebraska. It even become cliche joke (which is why the "In Nebraska...") and Russians often joke among each other about being carted off to Nebraska for minor offenses.
I was born in Siberia and still live here. I had a few opportunities to move to Moscow or get H1B and move to California but perhaps out of laziness I did not do that. Why bother? Living in Siberia is quite okay with me. Yes, long cold winters are not pleasant but this is not much a problem as I sit most of the day in a warm room with a computer before me.