Amazon's Cloud Data Center To Follow Google To Oregon

1sockchuck writes "All your online data doesn't really live in a big, fluffy cloud. It resides in servers and data centers. That's why Amazon.com is quietly building a large data center complex in Oregon along the Columbia River, not far from Google's secret data lair in The Dalles. Amazon Web Services started as a way to monetize excess data center capacity for its retail operation, but has grown to the point where it requires dedicated infrastructure. Amazon recently said that its S3 cloud storage service is hosting 29 billion objects."

Comments

I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[CdBee]

.. my files are getting to see parts of the world I've never even been to, via Jungledisk. Anyway, as an S3 customer, the more data centres they have, the better.

On an Ecological level I hope electricity in Oregon is mainly nuclear, wind or Hydro....

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, its hydro. Cheap "green" electricity why its becoming prime data center territory.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Snowblindeye]

.On an Ecological level I hope electricity in Oregon is mainly nuclear, wind or Hydro....

Yes, Hydro. Thats the main reason these companies are moving their data centers to Oregon: The availability of cheap and plentiful hydro power.

Lots of dark fiber that is well connected, as well as tax breaks, also help.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Fat Cow]

mainly hydro, some natural gas - http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/oregon.pdf

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[jellomizer]

Which is one of the advantages of remote data storage. If you keep your backups and have someone else far away keeping you data too. Then if something big happens Say say a Hurricane your data is still safe. Unlike someone who may have an excellent backup plan, however they get hit with a big disaster and a complete wipe out of their data is possible. The cost of say $1,000,000 of hardware is nothing compared to say a couple of terabytes of data.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[TubeSteak]

The availability of cheap and plentiful hydro power.

Lots of dark fiber that is well connected, as well as tax breaks, also help.

There are a bunch of States with good connections and cheap power.
It's almost always the tax breaks that make or break a company's decision to build in a specific place.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[lysergic.acid]

yea, data redundancy and backups are useless if you don't use off-site data protection for disaster recovery. even small businesses can greatly benefit from geographical redundancy.

even though the label i work at is based in California, we still took a major hit from Hurricane Katrina because the masters for several albums in our back catalog were kept at a recording studio that got flooded. after that happened, my boss starting holding onto copies of the masters himself here at the office and also backing up all the digital data onto an external hard drive that he gave to his dad for safe keeping.

of course, for businesses with large volumes of data that are constantly updated, cloud storage is probably the best solution. through multitenancy small to medium-sized businesses can enjoy the same level of data protection as large enterprises like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dalles is just upstream from bonneville dam. We have heaps of wind power and hydro. Oregon / Washington kicks ass for tech companies wanting to suck up energy.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[hairyfeet]

What I don't get is if it is power they want,why they don't come to AR. We got Nuclear power(so it's cheap) and we have a TON of abandoned Titan 2 missile silos that would be kick ass for data centers. They are deep enough underground that the cooling bills would be a whole lot cheaper,they would probably get a huge break on their insurance because nobody is going to get through those blast doors without permission,and they have been selling the things so cheap that some folks are actually turning them into houses. Plus I'm sure they have plenty of power and communication lines already run to hook them into the defense grid,and here in AR they are happy to give out huge tax breaks for anyone willing to bring their business here. It seems to me like it would be an easy way to save money on a data center.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[drjzzz]

The cost of say $1,000,000 of hardware is

...exactly $1M. Did the math.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[mcrbids]

As a hosted application provider, we provide no less than THREE separate geographical locations for DR of the data: the redundant, primary hosting cluster, a smaller, backup hosting cluster, and a non-hosted "if it gets this bad it's really, really bad" backup. Offsite backups happen automatically every night, so at any point, you'll never lose more than 24 hours worth of data. We've always offered this level of redundancy.

In a few months, we'll bring this 24 hour maximum latency down to less than 5 minutes!

You can argue "data security" all you want, but we've had a number of customers sign up when they lost all their data due to data security issues. In one case, their servers were actually stolen! (ie: physically GONE, no backups, geez...) If you choose a competent hosting provider, a hosted application can dramatically improve the security and reliability of access to your data.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not true. Most of the Google Oregon DC machines are powered by electricity that comes from somewhere else, not the local dams.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Anonymous Coward]

How will the fact that the silos are deep underground reduce the cooling requirements? It's the equipment that creates the heat, not any outside source.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[ionix5891]

missile silo! a /. nurd's ultimate bachelor pad?

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Anonymous Coward]

how is heating underground cheaper? you gotta then pump all that hot air out somehow

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Ihmhi]

My layman's guess would be the ambient temperature underground is lower overall, so while the equipment would indeed still generate heat you could just use venting to disperse most of the heat throughout the rest of the facility and it wouldn't affect things too much. The entire silo would be like one giant heatsink.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Bandman]

That's interesting. I suppose that you could make it a lot cheaper if you used the right kind of cooling...I just wonder what the local effects would be if you pumped the entire datacenter's heat output into the surrounding rocks. I wonder if they'd be able to keep up, or if their ambient temperature would end up being much higher.

Interesting idea, I just wouldn't want to experiment with a datacenter. I do dig the idea of housing computers in a missile silo, though. You've just got to watch out for Deep Crows

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Bandman]

I just wonder if the rock would effectively transfer and distribute the heat, or if the ambient temperature would eventually rise to meet the average output of the data center.

For google, we might be talking about magma ;-)

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Bandman]

It sounds like your plan is similar to mine, with the exception of the deltas for time. We're going to be getting 10Mb between our primary and secondary, as opposed to the 1.5Mb T1 we have right now, but they could be on the same network and it would still take me half an hour to do an rsync because it's got to index the files.

I'm currently keeping 1.3 million files (~450GB) in sync over that T1. Fortunately, there are usually only a few dozen GB a day, but sometimes there are more. It's madness, but we're improving it.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[feyhunde]

Something to ad for people who are unfamiliar with this area, there are 15 generating dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers. Most of the power for Oregon and Washington is generated off these. There's some nuclear, gas and wind as well. We buy and sell power as needed to California and the SW.

However the upper Columbia watershed has lost a lot of jobs due to the Aluminum industry collapsing in part due to power losses a few years ago. Low water combined with high temps and high demand in California redirected power from the smelting plants. Eventually the Aluminum plants said nuts and moved.

There is a chance this could bite Google and Amazon on the butt in the future.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[negRo_slim]

For google, we might be talking about magma ;-)

Here is a photographer (rooftop65) based in The Dalles, known to get a good shot or two of the Google data center.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[hairyfeet]

Actually talking to someone who worked construction one one he said it is pretty difficult to raise the temp above 63-65 degrees in them due to the depth. They also have plenty of large vent shafts to ensure fresh outside air,and they were built on the sides of hills which have very good fresh airflow which could be further used for cooling.

Also the missile shaft itself has floors at around 20 feet and continue every 20 feet all the way to the top for working on the missile. You could easily add metal grid floors over the shaft at these junction points and allow the natural airflow up the shaft provide a lot of the cooling. And finally at the deepest level there are quite large warehouse storerooms built so the soldiers could stay underground for a long time in the event of war. These storerooms were built at the lowest level so the natural cooling from the rock would minimize the need for refrigeration. It would probably be trivial to mount a few large fans to draw the air from these storerooms into the ventilation shafts.

And as I said earlier the insurance would probably be dirt cheap since all the wiring for the cameras,razor wire fences,and heavy blast doors are still there from its former use as a military post. Add in the low price of power thanks to Nuclear 1 and 2,and the fact that the state government has no problem giving huge tax breaks and other incentives to encourage business development,and it seems like an avenue worth exploring to me.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[QuantumRiff]

Oregon happens to have a very gentle sloping shelf at the ocean. Oregon also doesn't have a large amount of shipping traffic, with their nasty anchors. This makes it ideal to run an underwater fiber across the pacific. There are a ton of fibers going across the Pacific ocean from the state. (it is really strange to see a multi-gigabit fiber landing in a small ocean side town where they have difficulty getting anything but dial-up connections!) Oregon also has huge power lines, running right to the sites near where they are putting the datacenters. There used to be a ton of Aluminum Smelters in the Columbia gorge, that are mostly closed now, because they can't keep prices as low as foreign run smelters can. In fact, the large, hugely power hungry smelters were one of the main reasons all the dams on the Columbia were designed, to produce aluminum that was in such short supply in world war 2.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

Better beer in Oregon?

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

[WGFCrafty]

.. my files are getting to see parts of the world I've never even been to, via Jungledisk. Anyway, as an S3 customer, the more data centres they have, the better. On an Ecological level I hope electricity in Oregon is mainly nuclear, wind or Hydro....

From the article:

The Columbia River basin has large resources of hydro electricity generated from dams along the river. This cheap, clean power was a factor in Googleâ(TM)s decision to build a huge data center in The Dalles, Oregon and has fueled the tranformation of Quincy, Washington from a small farming town into a data center hub with new facilities from Microsoft and Yahoo.

Google is absurd about this

[Ralph Spoilsport]

If you go to the Google location in GOOGLE MAPS there is nothing to see.

As if.

Because if you go to the same location in mapquest, and turn on aerial view you see the buildings in all their glory.

And if you go to the Google Maps version and turn on Street View, you can see the buildings in living colour. Ground Level.

So, basically, Google's being stupidly secretive, as you can use their own tools against them.

Dur.

RS

Re:Google is absurd about this

[Tubal-Cain]

Uh, I can see the buildings just fine in google maps (maps.google.com, not that maps.google.ca address you gave.

Re:Google is absurd about this

[FooAtWFU]

If by "stupidly secretive" you mean "thrifty and not buying all the latest aerial imagery all the time"...

Re:Google is absurd about this

[LostCluster]

Maps areial views around here are about 10 years old, Street View is clearly newer than that where it exists. Is it censorship or just outdated images taken before the building was built?

Re:Google is absurd about this

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, I can see the buildings just fine in google maps (maps.google.com, not that maps.google.ca address you gave.

So, in Soviet Canuckistan we're not allowed to see images of Google's data centre? It's a bit odd.

Re:Google is absurd about this

[symbolset]

Because google.ca has to pay a lot of money to get those images from google.com?

I'm sorry. You had me for a minute and then you lost me.

Re:Google is absurd about this

[FooAtWFU]

Have to pay a lot of money? Maybe. Have you seen the kind of garbage that comes up when you're dealing with licensing stuff? And these are foreign affiliates, to boot, so there's an extra layer of dreck to work through.

I can't see any reason that they would care about images of their places. And if they really DID care, for some freakish reason, they're doing a poor job of keeping their secrets secret. I just don't see the conspiracy.

Re:Google is absurd about this

[symbolset]

I just don't see the conspiracy

I'm with you on that.

Re:Google is absurd about this

[davidphogan74]

Oddly going from the Google.ca link or typing in maps.google.com and searching "The Dalles, OR" gets me to the same graphic. Either way, Google's is more outdated.

It appears to be a State of Oregon-sourced picture via Google, while MapQuest seems to source their imagery for the area from a company marked i-cubed.

They're definitely differently sourced throughout Oregon, this can be spot checked (for example) at NW 9th Ave and NW Naito Pkwy in Portland. Depending on the zoom level MapQuest's photos are much older or older than Google's.

Huh?

[ScrewMaster]

All your online data doesn't really live in a big, fluffy cloud.

What? Now he tells me.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

All your online data doesn't really live in a big, fluffy cloud.

What? Now he tells me.

What next? No Heaven? No Easter Bunny? No Three Musketeers bars?

Re:Huh?

[aproposofwhat]

Damn - now I've got Little Fluffy Clouds buzzing round my tiny brain.

Haven't listened to that track in years.

Still, at least I'll go to sleep in a good frame of mind...

Re:Huh?

[mewshi_nya]

If you're posting to slashdot and you haven't figured that out... you're retarded. Literally.

Anyway, I like cloud services. They make life easier for the masses. Plus, raising awareness for backups is always nice! :D

Re:Huh?

[operagost]

It resides in tubes.

Re:Huh?

[MarkRose]

All your online data doesn't really live in a big, fluffy cloud.

What? Now he tells me.

Actually, your data is in an even better place. When they allocated your space, the big fluffy cloud was full, so your data is on little puffy bunny tails.

Re:Huh?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Well, if you were to use some suitably clever/malicious routing tricks, you might actually be able to use the internet as delay line memory...

(Even then, of course, you wouldn't really be "in the cloud" you'd be essentially storing your data in other people's routers; but the image isn't nearly as funny that way.)

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

All your online data doesn't really live in a big, fluffy cloud.

What? Now he tells me.

you must be new here!

Re:Oblig

[ScrewMaster]

Amazon has died of dysentery.

No, it was some mystery virus they picked up in the jungle.

These places are designed to be risk-averse

[TheModelEskimo]

If I had a mobile home, or if I lived on a boat, I would be really tempted just to follow the data centers and live wherever there's a major one. Seems like the Columbia river would be nice to have next door for the power-generation potential, also. Especially coming from someplace like California, where we have blackouts all the time. If the economy *is* going down the tubes, then now may be just the time to pick a strategic home base.

Re:These places are designed to be risk-averse

[Ariake Shikima]

Yeah except they seem not to remember the flood of 1947 that wiped out the Portland/Vancouver suburb of Vanport. Plus, right there next to active volcanoes... Make you wonder why they didn't build it inn the crated or Mt. St Helens. Or at least up next to Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. At least there you'd get the Lodge from The Shining to look at as you wander the dark corridors of the creepy volcano-dwelling data center.

Re:These places are designed to be risk-averse

[ScrewMaster]

Yeah except they seem not to remember the flood of 1947 that wiped out the Portland/Vancouver suburb of Vanport. Plus, right there next to active volcanoes... Make you wonder why they didn't build it inn the crated or Mt. St Helens. Or at least up next to Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. At least there you'd get the Lodge from The Shining to look at as you wander the dark corridors of the creepy volcano-dwelling data center.

Well, hopefully they have good insurance.

Re:These places are designed to be risk-averse

[narcberry]

Ah the bandwagon approach. That usually works out of everyone.

Re:These places are designed to be risk-averse

[istartedi]

Really? The entire area is near a subduction zone capable of producing earthquakes similar to the Good Friday quake that hit Alaska in 1964. These "megathrust" quakes tend to be MORE severe than the strike-slip quakes that occur in California. The last such quake in this area is thought to have occured circa 1700, IIRC, and caused a tsunami that was large enough to kill people in Japan after crossing the Pacific. The same plate interaction is also responsible for volcanism in that area. I don't know about the flood potential that the other guys mentioned. It seems like you can mitigate against that simply by building on high enough ground.

I'd say these places are designed to be cost effective, with risk being only part of the equation. The cost of land, the cost of power, and the cost of insurance all factor in. The odds of a their data center being destroyed by a megathrust quake are probably not that much greater than being destroyed by a strike-slip in the Bay Area, so the cost of insuring against it is probably similar.

Re:These places are designed to be risk-averse

[Joe Tie.]

I used to live pretty close to a googleplex, and had power failures fairly often. At least once every two months or so.

Re:These places are designed to be risk-averse

[Anonymous Coward]

Vanport != The Dalles.

Also, all the risk of a volcanic disaster wiping out a datacenter in Oregon is much less than an earthquake in California or a fire almost anywhere...

Google's Secret Lair

[d4nowar]

It's true about Google's secret lair.

Growing up in Oregon, there were often strange disappearances around The Dalles. Local folk stories talked about vans of mysterious Google workers kidnapping transients and performing experiments on them for upcoming products.

Re:Google's Secret Lair

[ScrewMaster]

It's true about Google's secret lair.

Growing up in Oregon, there were often strange disappearances around The Dalles. Local folk stories talked about vans of mysterious Google workers kidnapping transients and performing experiments on them for upcoming products.

Yes, I've been hearing about the new Google Implant. I don't think I'll be an early adopter on this one though.

Real estate

[symbolset]

Compared to California property is also cheap for now. If you want to recruit workers who know what they're doing and pay them under $150k, that's a plus.

Re:Real estate

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a pretty good price for California. If that were somewhere like Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, or even Venice Beach, I shudder to think. I live in DC and there are 1 bedroom condos across the street for the same price as that house.

29 billion objects eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Object 1 = new Object();

.
.
.

this is going to take a while to debug...

of course, objects

[drfireman]

Can someone explain what an "object" is?

Re:of course, objects

[narcberry]

Can someone explain what an "object" is?

If you're expected to come over each night, but you're not welcome in the morning... you.

Re:of course, objects

[Ant P.]

A euphemism for "file".

Re:of course, objects

[mpcooke3]

A piece of data addressable by a unique key. not unlike a file.

ill bite

[mgbastard]

Can anyone quantify and define an S3 object? How is that different than a file? Wouldn't it be useful to report the amount of storage used... I donut care that two users have 2 billion objects of 4 different image views of their online catalog :P

Re:ill bite

[perlchild]

It allows them to report a hello world at the same level as each link in a link-chained list of xml streams each at 200k... in other words, reporting them in bytes, would be much less impressive

My prediction

[aztektum]

Like Google they will be spending their power savings $$ advertising on Craigslist's Portland job ads page. The Dalle's is not exactly flush with computer savvy talent.

Re:My prediction

[born_and_raised]

Were you raised there? Because I was, and indeed, the place IS flush with computer savvy talent..that is, unless every high school kid between when I was in high school and now, has moved off to bigger and better things. (which I know is not true)

These guys again

[Jacques Chester]

datacentreknowledge.com is a goddamn scam. They always manage to make front page at Slashdot by regurgitating somebody's press release. Their summaries are incomplete and poorly summarised. Most of their articles link to other shitty articles in order to boost advertising revenue.

They add. No. Value. Whatsoever. Please stop linking to them, Slashdot.

Re:These guys again

[aaron alderman]

Their summaries are incomplete and poorly summarised. Most of their articles link to other shitty articles in order to boost advertising revenue.

Sounds perfect for slashdot!

That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean"

[Anonymous Coward]

Those dams are "Salmon" burners. Every search, every flop, every data object call, every request, instead of releasing a little puff of carbon into the air as it does in a coal fired electricity based server farmer, instead takes the life of a fraction of another salmon.

The salmon haven't got a chance as these out of state killers move in to suck the energy out of the river.

Just kidding?

Re:That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean"

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

You know what they call what happens to a salmon that goes through a hydro dam? Turbine induced stress.

No, I'm not kidding.

Re:That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean"

[Anonymous Coward]

A dam-installed hydro turbine is a slow thing, not a blender or a jet engine.

Turbine-passage survival is a complicated function of gap sizes, runner blade angles, wicket gate openings and overhang, and water passageway flow patterns.

The very latest set of retrofits at the Columbia and Snake dams had a goal of 98% survivability for turbine-passing fish, and higher for flume-passing fish. These retrofits are not only better for the fish, but produce more power.

Re:That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean"

[LordLucless]

As long as the salmon ends up on my place, I don't give a dam(n).

Re:That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean"

[Gronker]

You know what they call what happens to a salmon that goes through a hydro dam? Sushi?

Re:That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean"

[Anonymous Coward]

We have something called fish ladders,
and a report was just released stating that
a river with dams and fish ladders is equal to a river with no dams on it,
with respect to rate of fish surviving to breeding grounds.

Re:That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean"

[Anonymous Coward]

More than 70% of the time, and these days closer to 98%, it's still a live salmon. You can't even find the stress-related hormones in the fish after about 5 days.

Re:Oblig

[kbrasee]

You have died of dysentery. Settle here or move on?

To Oregon?

[dissy]

Amazon's Cloud Data Center to Follow Google to Oregon

Amazon has died of dysentery.

Re:To Oregon?

[Dorceon]

Shouldn't have brought so many grandfather clocks.

Re:To Oregon?

[basotl]

The Oregon Trail reference is awesome.

Use the thermal difference directly

[Nefarious Wheel]

If there were enough of a temperature differential you could use the difference itself to power the data centre, or a substantial part of it. You've already got a deep heat sink for cooling plus that hot Arizona air in the summer. There are large commercial Stirling cycle cogeneration engines available that might suddenly make economic sense, given that the expensive capital outlay of digging the rather large hole in the ground such a thing would require is already spent. I would suspect that the surrounding continental rock has sufficient thermal mass that it would be a very long time before saturation would be reached. Free non-nuclear, non-wind, non-hydrocarbon electricity, in bulk.

Re:Use the thermal difference directly

[hairyfeet]

Uuuuuh, AR is Arkansas. AZ is Arizona. But here in AR the summers have pretty much two stages: Hot and "Oh My God I'm going to melt out here!" so your theory would still hold. Also the winter is quite mild,with mostly rain instead of snowfall. But my friend said even during the hottest days of summer the silos remained in the low '60s due to the depth and rock acting as a heat shield. Of course the rain would help to cool the rock,thus making it a better heatsink,and IIRC the silos already had moisture removers on all the major vents to keep moisture away from the electronics. So I would think the combination of cheap Nuclear power,lower operating temp thanks to the depth,extra cooling provided by the wind and rain blowing across the hills,and finally the huge tax breaks would make this avenue an area worth exploring for any company interested in building a data center. Maybe some startup would like a cheap,military spec'd facility to set up a data center in?

A little background

[mad_clown]

The a great deal of Oregon's electricity is generated by the Columbia River dams. While massive hydro power generation is "greener" than, say, coal power, it's also extraordinarily destructive to the environment upriver from the dams.

Hydro power is also controversial because dams tend to reduce fish runs and, under Oregon law, native tribes are guaranteed the right to fish. This has become as real point of contention, as environmental activists and the tribes have maintained that a healthy river is a prerequisite for a healthy fish run and thus the rivers and the dams have become the subject of a whole series of lawsuits, with farmers, the hydro industry, transportation companies, etc. lined up on one side and environmentalists and the tribes lined up on the other.

The major dams such as Bonneville are, it's safe to say, not going anywhere any time soon. Thus, Oregon is going to be able to rely on hydro power for the foreseeable future. Some of the smaller dams, however, may very well be taken out.

Oregon is also running some early trials using ocean waves to generate power. I believe I've heard that there are some substantial wind power projects in the works as well.

Awesome news

[NinthAgendaDotCom]

As an Oregon resident, I gotta say: sweet! This is good news for Oregon's economy (which tends to lag behind the nation as a whole). I knew a contractor who interviewed at Google's Oregon data center. It sounded like a decent job (Linux technician work), only catch was the insane commute (Dalles, Oregon... which is a good hour-long drive or worse from Portland, so you'd basically have to move to that small town).