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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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"...

Huh?

[ScrewMaster]

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

What? Now he tells me.

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?

[operagost]

It resides in tubes.

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.

of course, objects

[drfireman]

Can someone explain what an "object" is?

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:Oblig

[kbrasee]

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

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.

To Oregon?

[dissy]

Amazon's Cloud Data Center to Follow Google to Oregon

Amazon has died of dysentery.