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Will Silicon Valley Run Out of Data Center Space?
1sockchuck writes "With capital scarce, data center developers are prioritizing projects in northern Virginia, where the Obama stimulus plan and federal shift to cloud computing are likely to boost data center demand from government agencies. This is forcing them to delay or scale back large projects in Santa Clara, setting the stage for a supply/demand imbalance in Silicon Valley, particularly for large space requirements. One potential mitigating factor: some currently occupied data center space could become available through the failure of venture-backed startups."
There is a TON of unused data center space in the bay area, as dotcoms have folded up or moved.
I think we should start building hardened data center sites miles underground! And have like nukes defending them! And there should be these huge walls that don't allow anyone in or out! And guard dogs!
Sorry, for a moment there, I thought we were still in a cold war.
Maybe they could just move them next door to the next valley? I am sure there are plenty of nice valleys around that are just waiting to take all the required new data centers. Maybe snap up some bargain land from those plummeting subprime land prices?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
If there's demand, someone will supply it. If the demand is for unrealistically cheap service, then that's not real demand.
Coal-burning plants in the Appalachians, and a massive transmission line that Dominion Power wants to run across large swaths of W Va and VA. Now that the administration is behind the idea, the local opposition doesn't stand a chance.
My friend Debbie Ann is so promiscuous, instead of an appointment book she needs a package manager
I wouldn't even consider building a fresh data center here, just because of earthquakes alone.
Move to Sacto or something.
There was a slashdot article just recently on how easy it is to move your cloud servers to a low-tax, business-friendly jurisdiction.
Your cloud services are also easily moved to a LOW COST location.
Sheesh. Think a little.
Perhaps it wasn't a typo... but a snide remark. Silly-con -> Sillicon
Were going to need a bigger valley!
Start digging or start dying.
I wouldn't even consider building a fresh data center here, just because of earthquakes alone.
Move to Sacto or something.
How about those Rust Belt states? Or Detroit? Or anywhere else where there are lots of out of work folks and where the cost of living is a fraction of California? There are colleges and universities that have CS and engineering programs outside of CA - meaning, you can find people with the necessary skills in other areas in those parts of the country. They're not all blue collar union members who refuse to learn new skills.
No, it won't be a problem.
There will be very, very few new startups in the US. And many of the existing startups will shut down. There's just not much point in starting a business in the US any more.
- IPOs used to be plentiful, but that was before Sarbanes-Oxley made going public astronomically expensive.
- The government is sucking up most of the country's available capital [to buy votes] for stimulus and other government spending, leaving less available for business growth.
- The new stock option rules more-or-less preclude giving lower-level employees company stock so they share in the success of the company.
- Even for those that do see success, the tax rate will be 60-70% in a few years, so they won't be able to keep much of what they make. They won't be able invest the money in new startups because the taxes will take too much and there will be none left over.
- And don't forget that everyone knows businesses are villains and rich businessmen are hated. Why subject yourself to all that for such low after-tax gains?
See this article by Victor Davis Hanson.
See this article by T. J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor.
See this article by Michael S. Malone.
It's not really the land of opportunity any more -- not unless you know just the right people in government or the environmental industrial complex to steer you an earmark. And even those will run out in a few years after all the money is spent and all the output from the country's slowly-declining future production is borrowed and spent.
There will be plenty of vacant data center space.
I'm confused, I've been watching some videos and reading stories on the Onion's site. This story just fit right in.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
I've worked in several large datacenters in the Atlanta area for various clientes in the past few months. These things are overbuilt, and half or more of their capacity looks idle. Speaking with dc staff, many of even the populated cages are idle/bankrupt/abandoned.
And the dc salesmen have seemed pretty eager last 6 months or so. I've bought some rack space & virtual servers recently, and got some shinin' deals.
So I can attest to the fact that at least that postulate about dc capacity being underutilized.
But, things seem on the upswing now though, at least my intuition says so.
There are only two places in the US where datacenters can be built - Silicon Valley and Northern Virginia.
With improved density current installation needs should be met forever even without folding .coms.
More importantly, the datacenter should locate somewhere with cheap power, labor and real estate that has good fiber. Where in the world it is is irrelevant - people who run servers don't fondle the hardware any more.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Just put in a fat pipe to the data center & connect it to the backbone. Data centers are (by design) a commodity, and as such will be outsourced to where it makes sense.
Hell, I live near Tampa, Florida. I'm here to tell you that half of the homes in this area are empty. Everyone's leaving the state. You can probably pick up foreclosed properties for next to nothing.
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... do the data centers need to be located in Silicon Valley? I thought this thing called The Internet negated the need for geographical co-location.
...the most dense data center in the world is the SuperNAP locate here in Vegas:
http://www.switchnap.com/
A lot more are being built here as this is the safest place from disasters in the US.
The next valley over is the Central Valley. I shit you not , I live in the Bay Area and if my wife would let me, I would drive us all the way up near Redding along 101 and then back down along the Sierras to get Yosemite without having to drive through the Central Valley (ok I shit you a little but trust me it does suck). That's California they conveniently don't mention in the brochures.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
Definately. It's just what you need to push for good stability in the north.
The amount of crime, abuse, drug use, and poverty in the north is astounding for a region in a highly-developped nation.
(or were you saying by the 49th? I was thinking more towards Iqaluit)
The federal deficit will soon be at a level where no amount of gdp increase will be able to pay it off.
If US GDP goes up by 10%, the covers the existing budget gap and then some. Historically, this usually takes place every two or three years. Right now, we're in a recession. The problem with US finances is that Medicare is going up at an even faster rate. Health care does ultimately need to be rationed, or basically, people are going to have to be thrown off of Medicare, simply to control costs. I'm not a big Obama fan but he is right when he said that Grandma's hip replacement might not be something we can afford, and, Republicans are really disingenuous when they say reform means rationing. National bankruptcy means rationing too. We simply can't afford to grow health care by 8% a year forever.
This is my sig.
... of the million-dollar mansions of all the pre-Internet-Bubble-burst CEOs and entrepreneurs. Have they spec'ed out those for data centers yet?
Every wonder why San Jose, Cupertino, Mountain View, Fremont, Milpitas, Santa Clara, Palo Alto and all the other major cities of the valley have no sky line and are flat? It is because there are lots of building height restrictions in San Jose and the other cities of Santa Clara County (with a few special exceptions made for buildings like Fairmont Plaza and the Adobe towers). If those restrictions were relaxed we could quickly build huge data centers that occupy only a small footprint. Tall buildings can be made earthquake resistant, lots of buildings survived the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in San Francisco (which has numerous tall buildings), and the technology for hardening buildings against quakes has improved since then.
If Silicon Valley wants to continue to be a tech hub, they really need to add solar power to as many buildings as possible to reduce utility costs. Build up to make room for businesses in downtown and north San Jose (aka Cisco-land). With data centers comes more tech jobs, and more jobs those who provide services to tech people. (restaurants, computer stores, prostitutes, coffee bars, etc)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Actually, I'd love it if a bunch of tech jobs started appearing way up north.. Yellowknife was a nice little city, and I liked Anchorage alot, I might jump at a chance to work up there for a few years.
Oh no, not again.
There's something about network connectivity that works well with data centers - take a look at any of the "map of the internet" graphics and you'll see that a huge number of major networks intersect in Silicon Valley. There aren't many places on earth better if what you need is bandwidth and low latency.
Unfortunately, the real estate costs are among the highest in the country and labor costs are correspondingly high. So the building and the drones who staff it are more expensive in Silicon Valley than almost anywhere else. What this has led to is many of the large corporations in the Silicon Valley area moving their data centers to less expensive locations that have more business-friendly politicians. Between that and the recent recession, there's lots of data center space available in Silicon Valley - along with lots of power and network connectivity. It's just that cost factor that makes it less attractive. Of course, the quality of employee you can hire in Silicon Valley is quite different than the quality of employee you can hire in Butt Scratch, TN.
It's usually not obvious - for example, when HP "merged" with Compaq they consolidated their data centers - at Compaq's TX location. Many other corporations have done the same thing over the last few years. It's an obvious choice for them - but taken as a whole, it's left a lot of data center space vacant and quite a few sysadmins and techs out of work.
While the developers were focused on their jobs being outsourced to some foreign country and any new jobs being taken by H1B employees, the folks that supported them also had their jobs on the line.
There's some other places in the country that had their IT business base disappear that are desperate to have some jobs. MA, VA and others are looking to move some business in and there's lots of space and they'll cut a deal on taxes or whatever it takes. Guess what - it's going to be the same damned thing all over again. You guys want too much money, we can get the same thing from those guys for less. Once the word gets out and everyone piles on, the cheap place gets expensive and the cycle repeats. Worried about your job being outsourced to India? Don't be - the Indians are all full up and are now outsourcing their jobs to where ever they can get it done for less.
It's just the same old crap - the corporation needs to make more profit each and every year. Labor is one of their biggest expenses, and even your typical mouth-breathing executive can see that the folks in Montana will work for a lot less money than the ones in New York will. So they'll move IT to Montana until they've hired every person there that can spell IT and the cost of labor starts to rise. Pay them more? Just for long enough to move things to Wyoming where the people are more reasonable.
Some day someone will realize that this can't keep on going like this - but that day isn't now, and it's not likely to come for a while.
That article sounds bogus. The problem seems to be that there's not much demand for more capacity, not that there's a lack of floor space.
If anybody actually needs a few thousand servers in Silicon Valley right now, I know a company that has them idle. Machines less than 18 months old, 8 CPUs per server, plenty of bandwidth. Serious inquiries only.
. Some of us aren't willing to have our life-and-death choices subject to government bureaucratic decision trees.
What's the difference between government and an insurance company? I just don't get it. I'm not seeing how you could be any more bureacratic that Cigna, Aetna or Blue Cross.
. And this is a matter of life and death for me and everyone else who uses health care.
Either way, its not your money. Your life or death decisions are making my health care more expensive, public or private.
This is my sig.
They seem to have a lot of excess capacity if you judge from what they're offering on leased servers.
I used to host my own gear up here in Maine (standby generator and all) but I could never get the bandwidth or reliability I can in a pro datacenter, and as the prices dropped so much there was no reason for me to worry about hardware any more.
As far as colo vs. leased server space - I'll take a leased server any time. The only servers I touch are in my office for development use. Customer facing stuff is all hosted now. I'm so used to remote management now that I rarely walk over to the servers I have here anyway.
I'm hosted at The Planet -- definitely lower end than say, Rackspace, but I've had no problems with them other than one outage that frankly they were amazing about handling. I've got servers in two cities for redundancy and am quite happy with the price/performance.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I wonder how much of this problem is negated by the fact that startups are increasingly turning to cloud computing as a way to manage the server infrastructure. Amazon and the like have servers in many locations making them relatively immune from these kind of demand shortages.
Even if that wasn't true, and like others have said, if the cost of storing your server is too high in San Fransisco, just drive it over to Sacramento (less than two hours drive) or down to Los Angeles (less 5 hours away if you take i5 like a proper Californian). Or heck, even Texas or NY. Who cares. Just have enough backups to handle the hardware failures properly.
Ah! Someone with a brain! Yes, that's what I had in mind when I mentioned the cost of power and bandwidth, but obviously I should hsve said so, because from replies I got other than yours, it's clear that most people simply haven't been paying attention.
Yes, there is plenty of talent out West and I'd bet some of it is even willing to work for cheap since work isn't that plentiful out there (yet). Don't make the mistake of thinking that living near the East Coast or the West Coast is prerequisite for learning IT skills. There are plenty of colleges and universities, and there is TONS of information online that's available for free, much of it very good.
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Why in the world does the data center have to be next door to you?
With tools like VPN, HP's ILO, Dell's DRAC, and countless other hardware management console ports, serial to Ethernet switches, KVM to VNC or whatever else, it's really easy to rarely if ever see the "hardware".
I mean come on, we're "slash dot", if we cannot install Linux, change the configuration in IOS, or patch/reboot Windows from 400+ miles away, we may have to change our name to "wiener dot".
I don't want to be wiener dot.
Respect the Constitution
CA's loss is Seattle's and Austin's gain. Why would you start a company in CA and have to pay so much in taxes and worry about reliable power and whatnot, when you could instead be in WA or TX with no state income tax?
CA doesn't have a lock on smart tech people, plus the longer CA allows problems to exist, the more those great programmers, investors, system admins, network engineers and whatnot are dispersing to other parts of the country.
Silicon Valley in CA? No thanks, I will take Silicon Hills in Austin, TX, because I make the same pay, but in Austin I get to keep more of it.
Respect the Constitution
....It's the watts.
You can brag about density all you want, but if you can't deliver the needed wattage to the racks AND the HVAC tonnage to carry away the dissipated heat, it doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
Regards;
Agreed. It's truly the armpit of California.
$0.06/kWh, tons o' space, and it's in Texas, which is a much better place to have a business (or live) than California.
After Sonoma County dried up in terms of jobs for technical people, we moved to San Jose in hopes of earning a living in a place where there was technology happening. The real estate prices were high, I was unable to find work, and eventually I had to bail. Now I live in a city that only has one software company, but the weather is nice and the traffic doesn't turn ugly during commute time. I don 't miss the smog, the traffic, or the arrogant people. The Internet has freed us to work where we like and the Silicon Valley is just somewhere I drive through on the way to the North Bay. I don't miss it, except for weird stuff warehouse :-)