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Credit Crunch Squeezing Data Center Space
miller60 writes "Many companies have saved money by leasing wholesale 'plug and play' data center space instead of building their own facilities. But the credit crunch has slowed the construction of new data centers, and analysts say this will create a shortage of data center space in 2010 in key markets like northern Virginia and Silicon Valley where demand exceeds supply. The situation is already becoming critical for companies with large space requirements, as indicated by a flurry of leasing recently in northern Virginia, where the remaining space may be quickly absorbed by government stimulus projects."
As the supply of data center space dwindles, the price will go up. When it goes up enough, it will become profitable to build new data centers, and it will happen. It's the economy, people.
My Freakin Blog
We've been fighting to find decent data center space for a good while here in Tampa, FL. Level(3) keeps saying they cannot provide enough power to fully utilize their facilities (we read that as holding onto premium real estate for the high bidders) and other data centers we've looked into are either ludicrously expensive or force us to use their connections to the internet which we, as an ISP, really don't want to do.
Yes, and knowing ahead of time what the economy is likely to do is the key to making money from it, which is something some people are very interested in.
It's already profitable. The credit crunch has quashed new centers from being built because the credit markets are frozen due to irrational fears, something the supply/demand model does not account for. When the space dwindles the new centers will be built but there's a lag, it's not instant, also something supply/demand models do not account for. Let's leave the Econ 101 classroom theory alone and take a look at the real world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
There's more to the world than NOVA. Unless you have ITAR requirements for government work.
Temporary shortages of things like this are the ultimate Non-Story.
If we want to really HoZe this industry, let the government step in. Otherwise will the hand wringers please shut up and sit down and let the market handle this!?
Yes, financing may be tight, unless you are Google or Amazon, or Apple, or IBM, or Microsoft. But it it IS a problem you haven't built your business case very well. There are Venture Capitalists out there roaming around looking for ways to put their money to work, and infrastructure is a lot more reliable then next weeks "big thing" software project.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Old news.
I used to work at a VERY LARGE worldwide Telco/ISP. Most of the data centers (almost 40 Class A and hundreds of lower class) locations were closed to new systems due to power and space constraints. We had to retire a system in order to place a new anything into it and the power utilization had to be less than the previous equipment because networking equipment was using more power than ever before (fibre uses more power than copper).
Then we bought an RBOC that had some space and power available in their data centers - the explosion of new projects trying to get placed into them was unbelievable.
All this was 2-3 years ago.
I think you meant to say, "so does the increase in the number of servers".
If server sales fall, the number of total server still increases as long as the number of servers being removed does not exceed the number of new servers being racked.
How you want to count virtual servers is up to you.
> also something supply/demand models do not account for.
I'm sorry, but thats just wrongheaded.
Supply and Demand does not "account" for anything. Price does.
Lead time, credit availability, competition, quality, speed, permitting issues and, yes, Supply and Demand are ALL accounted for by the final Price. And so is behavior, reluctance to take risk.
It is all encapsulated in the price.
I suggest you have left too much of Econ 101 in the classroom, if you ever attended at all.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
India has a pretty firm grasp on data centers now, India's economy is doing ok at the moment.. so net effect? No data center shortages.
Total capacity is if we actually used all of our available space instead of dedicating some of it to on-site tape storage, admin cubicles, increased our eletrical capacity to max, and same with AC. You won't see a data center shortage, you will however see an upsurge in datacenter remodeling.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
That can be very common when the rack density exceeds their cooling or power capacity. They'll have customers purchase empty space to offset that rack full of blade servers.
this is my sig
What's going on with slashdot? If I click on a story link, like
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/05/29/2010202/Credit-Crunch-Squeezing-Data-Center-Space
I get a "connection reset by peer" error message.
But if I change the url to
http://slashdot.org/story/09/05/29/2010202/Credit-Crunch-Squeezing-Data-Center-Space
then everything works fine.
They ran out of data center space for the machines the subdomains were hosted on.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Sounds fishy to me.
Power demands of rack servers have been falling dramatically for years...
Read the post more closely. It's the networking equipment that is chewing up more power. You have to make up for it by using lower-power(-input) servers.
As someone involved in designing the servers I can attest that they ARE taking more power. (Part of that is that they're doing more stuff than just hot-potatoing packets. Part is that they're putting more bandwidth into each RU (Rack Unit {of height in a rack}). And part is that the currently-deploying generation of networking equipment uses custom chips built in the stage of silicon feature shrinkage where the leakage got so big that it is consuming as much power as the computation - the generation before the foundaries figured out a way around that and started cutting the leakage fraction back down.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Repeat after me: There is no such thing as a shortage in a free market.
Whenever you read a story about a shortage of something, 9 times out of 10 it's bull. Shortages only occur when artificial price controls are put on goods and services.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
We tripled the number of servers and halved the space requirements by virtualizing as much as we could. The only things we couldn't put in a VM were stuff with specific HW requirements (like fax server boards and tape robots). Many large companies are just afraid or unaware of the capabilities of virtualization. The big software companies also aren't helping. For example, Oracle needs to get over it and figure out that many midsize companies don't need RAC for performance or 24/7 @ 99.999% - there are many, many businesses that really can tolerate an app being down for under an hour (or less) while the VM is brought up on a different physical box. The current Oracle license model completely fails in an environment where you want to run mulitple VMs on relatively cheap multicore, multiprocessor blades.
Small to medium sized datacenters are in the 100s of racks range. They measure power capacity in megawatts (MVA).
Typically, though, your real constraint is the cooling system. For this reasons the datacenter most of my clients are in gives you a certain amount of floor space for a certain amount of power when you buy a cage. The power works out such that you couldn't really fill a whole 42U with 1U servers, let alone blades.