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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
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
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.)
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.
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".
I don't think that they deserve much heat over this.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They should do this. ;)