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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.
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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.
At what point then does it make sense to hire a data center with a fat pipe that's located on foreign soil? If domestic (USA) data center space is becoming a scarcer, and thus more expensive, resource and that point is reached sooner rather than later, wouldn't this represent yet more wealth being transferred out of this country? I don't know how large and significant this market is, but it sounds like one that is only going to become more significant as the need to store electronic data is only going to grow. The summary notes:
Some stimulus indeed if it encourages wealth to leave this country. Now I am rather ignorant about economics. I can apply basic reasoning like this but I really don't know much about the topic and I freely admit that. Is there any likely way that this would not be the case?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
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
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.