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Google's Addiction to Cheap Electricity
Googling Yourself writes "Harpers magazine has published a blueprint of Google's new data center at The Dalles, Oregon where they will be tapping into some of the cheapest electricity in North America. Although the plans show three 68,680-square-foot storage buildings, only two of the buildings have been constructed so far. Based on a projected industry standard of 500 watts per square foot, the Dalles plant can be expected to use 103 megawatts of electricity. Google's server farm represents a new phase in the transformation of the Columbia River over the past half-century. Across the street from the Google data center is an example the last generation of high energy consumers; Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.com are also planning data centers on the Columbia River."
Why don't they build it in DC? The amount of political hot-air around these days would surely be sufficient to power a substantial wind farm.
Of course companies that have large compute clusters are migrating to areas that offer steady low cost power and cooling. It is simple business. Power and Cooling account for the majority of the expense of running a DataCenter. The draw is a lot of extremely cheap electricity combined with cold outside air (allowing bypass cooling) is something that is to important to pass up if you have thousands of servers.
One other thing to keep in mind is that in many places the power infrastructure is strained to its limit. For example I heard that to get 1 megawatt of power in downtown San Francisco it will take upwards of Three years for PG&E to deliver. Putting DataCenters in locations that aren't constrained is just good business sense.
Colin McNamara - CCIE #18233 "The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer"
News at 11.
Quick, submit a new story to /., "Google uses lots of internet bandwidth".
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
They should build a data center here in New York State's North Country. We have cheap and plentiful water power, plus its cold enough in the winter that cooling the data center is simple: just open a window.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
50 years ago the Columbia river gorge was filled by the aluminum industry looking for cheap electricity to run their furnaces.
I guess Internet servers are the new fires of industry.
The sun goes down at night (you need to get out more), and the wind stops. Water, on the other hand, doesn't stop falling.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
They have the mobile google-boxes all over the place, but there are still a number of purposes for a static, secure, and reliable data center. I think a combination of the two makes the most effective system. High speed coupled with high reliability, with everything able to reroute in real time.
It disappoints me that a three-word smartass comment gets modded up, even when it misses the point.
TFA addresses much larger issues than shopping for cheap electricity. It's about how the Internet companies require vastly more energy to run than most people realize, and how taxpayers are footing the bill for a lot of it.
Transporting large amounts of power still costs money... all those 320kV lines? Those use large amounts of copper ($$), they have to be mantained ($$)... There are some lines in place, yes, but the more power you send farther, the more cable you have to run, and up goes the cost of providing the power. That cost then gets passed on to the consumer, in the form of not-so-cheap-any-more electricity.
Download a file, kill a salmon.
I live in Portland and this is the first I've heard of various tech companies building along the Columbia. It kind of sucks to see Oregon becoming more popular - something like 95% of the state lives west of Portland. I don't want to see the state becoming like California.
:(
So if you're thinking of moving to Oregon, remember: It rains here ALL THE TIME. There's hippies everywhere. Nearly half the women in Portland are lesbians too!
Actually, I didn't make that last line up.
*sigh* Ever our governor once said "Oregon: a nice place to visit, but please don't stay."
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
And before I get modded down: how exactly is Google supposed to get the power to run not just the servers, but the cooling, network switches, and other hardware that will keep it from the equivalent of being Slashdotted?
Considering that Google is one of the top sites on the Internet, I frankly have no problem with this, considering there aren't any viable solutions to produce power of that magnitude (though it'll be interesting if Google eventually just builds its own power plant -- GoogleVolts FTW!); and after all, they've got shareholders to look after...gotta keep the company profitable. Google (and the other companies on that will be on that river) will probably donate some of its funds to carbon offsets to shut everybody up and get good PR at the same time.
This taxpayer says "better the funds go to Google (or other companies) rather than to a pointless war."
But I don't live in the town in question, so what I say is moot. But don't complain to Google...complain to the city for pimping themselves out to get the corps to build there. We've been down this road hundreds of times across the country with Wal-Mart.
And as an aside, I'm a little loath to quote that Harper's article as gospel considering that the server count in the article went from "1,000s" to "a thousand times more?! With no source?! I have to call shenanigans on that hand-waving, sorry.
(Full disclosure: I have a GMail account. But I would say the above if this was say, Wikipedia that's using that power.)
That would be offset by the cost of having to learn a new language, new customs, etc. I mean, what's the exchange rate between a hockey goal and a touchdown nowadays? When do you append "eh" to the end of a sentence? How, exactly, are you supposed to say "schedule"? These are all serious barriers to companies relocating to Canada.
Not really. Mainframes do batch processing of predetermined non-interactive workloads best. Google does interactive database searches with a fraction of a second latency, serves up web ads, and is trying to host traditional desktop applications via a web browser.
Mainframes have really puny CPU horsepower relative to their size, cost and power consumption. Their OSes are tuned for batch processing. Almost every compromise in mainframe design is decided in favor of uptime and transactional integrity, things for which Google has almost no use at all. They would be throwing a lot of money at solving issues they don't have if they ran mainframes, and even if they did manage to buy enough mainframes to handle their particular workload, it would probably end up using more power than they're using now.
Let's try and do some math. A standard industry 1U server is nowadays using as much as 500 Watts. OK, for arguments sake, let's half that, utilization is not always 100%. Then we have 40 servers in a rack, so that adds up to 10 kW per rack.
:) I was looking at roughly 20 racks of servers. And the heat that came out of that row, man oh man, it was pretty intense.....
Now a rack is 2x3 feet, but you need space in front and at the back, so lets take 2 feet wide (that doesn't change) and 10 feet deep, a total of 20 sq.ft. In which case we get to a power consumption of exactly 500 Watt/Sq.Ft. Most datacenters will not have this model of 40 1U servers in a rack running at full blast. But Google probably is one of those that do exactly that.
Once I was in a co-location datacenter where one of the cages was occupied by google. That was still the time when they built their own servers, 4 motherboards in a 1U tray, 144 MBs in a rack. In this case / cage
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
Actually, long-haul lines are all alumium these days. The resistivity is slightly higher, so the lines are thicker, but the aluminum costs less and weighs less for the same load capacity as the copper.
Your point is still completely correct, though.
Because transporting information is a hell of a lot cheaper than transporting electricity.
The only product Google sells is digital information. Transporting data is dirt cheap. So Google could care less where the data is, as long as they can access it quickly.
Transporting electricity requires big cables made of very expensive metals. Power transmission systems are massive and require a lot of maintenance. They are affected by wind, ice, and lightening. The amount of power Google uses is not at all trivial to have run into urban or suburban areas. Worse yet, when electricity is transmitted, a lot of it leaks out along the way.
Compared to electricity, transporting information is dirt cheap. Data can be transported by much less expensive and much smaller fiber optic cables. Fiber optics require a lot less maintenance than power lines. Lightening strikes, ice, and high winds don't usually have any impact on fiber backbones. Better still, comparatively tiny amounts of electricity are needed to maintain data integrity over long distances. And unlike power transmission, the valuable stuff being transmitted doesn't leak out along the way.
All Google cares about is getting the information back and forth between its users. So it really doesn't matter where the data center is. Electricity is even cheaper at places like Canada's James Bay project. I suspect the only reason Google doesn't go to places like that is the difficulty in getting quality staff to work so far north and so far from "civilization".
At The Dalles is one of the many dams along the Columbia River that supply all that electricity. But before the dam was completed in 1957, it had been one of the most important places in North America for the indigenous people. On March 10, 1957, hundreds of observers looked on as a rising Lake Celilo rapidly silenced the falls, submerged fishing platforms, and consumed the village of Celilo, ending an age-old existence for those who lived there.
I don't think that they deserve much heat over this.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Subsidies are any form of government granted (financial) benefit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy#Tax_Subsidy
Feel free to read about the other types of subsidies.
In this case, [company] gets to use the full range of government services without paying the same taxes like everyone else.
In TFA I linked, Yahoo and Microsoft are threatening to build their datacenters somewhere else unless they get (amongst other things) a specific exemption from the 6.5% sales tax on their purchases for the datacenters, because "the [Washington] state Department of Revenue recently determined that the server farms aren't eligible for an existing tax exemption for rural manufacturers".
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Heat. Living things grow in the Columbia River.
how to invest, a novice's guide
They should do this. ;)
Funny that, I was looking at the US per-state GDP just last night.
Oregon is a nice place. I was through Portland many years ago after biking from Port Angeles around the mountainous backside of Washington, then back inland along the Columbia River through to Portland (elevation 60 feet IIRC) where we visited Peter Norton's alma mater, the west again to the Oregon coast along the Van Duzer corridor, a rather wussy pass through the Rockies as these things go, but we happened to buck the headwind of all time. On a Ferry, I would have been looking for spray. One of those days where you crest a false flat, then gear *down* for the descent.
Portland reminded me of Vancouver, minus East Hastings, but also minus the international food scene. Mother-earth Birkenstocks, check. Birkenstocks with purple daisies, check. Birkenstocks with bike cleats, check. What's not to like?
Let's take a GDP stroll mostly along the Appalachians, the one region of the US I've never visited (unless you count Pittsburgh).
44 Kentucky 29,842
45 Alabama 29,697
46 South Carolina 29,642
47 Oklahoma 29,545
48 Montana 27,942
49 Arkansas 27,875
50 West Virginia 24,748
51 Mississippi 24,062
The only reason Oregon looks bad by any measure is having done so little with so much. Reminiscent of the Hudson's Bay Company, the oldest commercial corporation in North America. Sold off more assets than Rockefeller and Carnegie combined (fur trade, oil and gas, trans-continental railway rights, etc.) but always kept its eye on the prize: $10 dress shirts. With a competent management team, a business plan, a vast supply-chain infrastructure, a will to succeed, a grasp on reality, and lots of immigrant labour, it could have been Walmart. Who knew?
If you want a cheap cooling bill at the site of massive Hydro infrastructure, check out Cold and colder.
Kitimat would need undersea cables tapping into the Pacific grid, but if you wanted your data center to resemble Cheyenne Mountain, that could be arranged. In Sept-Iles you would enjoy the language laws and two layers of Federal government. In both locations you would enjoy Canadian privacy laws we have passed, and the DMCA we haven't yet passed. 30 annual days with a high above 20 degrees C (68 F). 100MW there would barely ripple the meters.
You'd end up with higher latencies, and less routing redundancy. The ports and heavy infrastructure would be world class, but you might also discover that Fedex doesn't guarantee same week delivery for six months out of the year.
The one concession I would have demanded from Google at Dulles is an Enron-esque contract to shed load during a grid crisis. Should be no problem for Google to design the data center to shed load a a MW/minute for half an hour. The spiders, for example, can tolerate a little downtime. Plus Google has the capacity to load-balance globally.
Not many people realize this, but the phone companies in the 1970s routinely routed long distance calls from Boston to Tampa through western time zone