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Data Center Building Boom In Silicon Valley
1sockchuck writes "Data center developers are building like mad in Silicon Valley, with seven active projects in Santa Clara alone. The building boom includes the resumption of several stalled projects that prompted concerns of a shortage of wholesale data center space in the Valley. The flurry of construction activity is different from the overbuilding during the dot-com boom, which was characterized by too much funding and too few customers. This time, industry experts say, the end of a funding drought has created a situation in which construction is struggling to stay ahead of demand from companies like Facebook — which just scarfed up an entire new data center in Santa Clara."
thats what they all say.
what about when the next fad comes along and facebook is forgotten over night?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Still I agree that this rising demand on the tail of the recession is a good sign, for the valley in particular.
Nobody wants to pay the ridiculous land prices for storing machines and blowing cold air on them. If you come to Silicon valley you will see that there is so much space everywhere. But real estate is crazy expensive. They could totally build data centers a little away from here, it may just be easier for them to have data centers closer for reliability/availability etc etc purposes.
So, people are constructing new data centers on some of the most expensive real estate in the USA, in an area with highly paid IT workers with zero company loyalty, and an area of high electricity rates. Note to self: do not invest in these companies.
A lot of commercial real estate in Silicon Valley sits empty: just drive around Santa Clara, or N 1st St in San Jose. Why cannot it be converted to the data center space ?
Don't know if you've ever taken a look outside a data center, but they often have multiple, high-voltage power feed dead-end at the building. At my current colo, the excellent Herakles data center in Sacramento, CA, they are literally located directly under a major set of power lines.
So you take some office building that was burning perhaps a couple hundred watts per 100 SqFt during mid-day, and colocate 42U racks within, raising energy density from maybe 200 watts/100 SqFT to a few thousand. To give some idea, I personally oversee about 3,000 watts in a single 1U rack at my colo, well over 200 cores, and many terabytes of data. And that's in a single 1U rack, maybe 24" wide and 36" deep, with some allowance for aisleway... and my situation isn't even mildly unusual.
We're not talking 3,000 watts capacity, we're talking 3,000 watts 24x7 continuous draw, of redundant, backed-up power - the most expensive kind. Whole houses usually don't draw this much. And this is a *single* 42U rack.
This is feasible? That's a *lot* of power...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Just out of curiousity, what sort of job experience, schooling, certification etc. would they be looking for for jobs at these data centers?
We're not talking 3,000 watts capacity, we're talking 3,000 watts 24x7 continuous draw, of redundant, backed-up power - the most expensive kind. Whole houses usually don't draw this much. And this is a *single* 42U rack.
This is feasible? That's a *lot* of power...
What are you on about? 3kW is nothing and many 2 story houses running an airconditioner run 5 times that! Sure it's not backed up and unless then owner is rich or insane it's not running 24x7 so you may have some point on expense, but to put things in perspective 1000W vacuum cleaners are relatively weak. Again I'm not suggesting these are run 24x7. But we're not talking the power out put of the sun at 30 paces when we're talking 3kW.
Similarly "many terabytes" is unimpressive when I can get 2TB drives for well under $200 and 200 cores ain't so impressive when a standard mid range desktop comes with 4 these days.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
One thing that the commenters here have overlooked is the availability of direct connections to the Internet backbone. The biggest nexus of end and peering points is right there in Silicon Valley so hooking into huge bandwidth is much less expensive than it would be in other locations. Is the property cost too high? It used to be, but these days there's plenty of vacant space and the costs have gone down substantially thanks to the recession. There's plenty of electrical power available and it's in close proximity to a very large population of internet users. What's not to like?
Those who see this as a boom that will produce jobs that are worth moving to Silicon Valley for are best advised to stay home. The recession has hit the IT folks there very hard and there's about 30% unemployment in that field. Data centers aren't places that require large staffs; one or two people to monitor the systems is about it and they'll do it all from moving servers around to fielding support calls. There's nothing there for people coming from out of state and nothing for the folks that are already here. Many of those H1B workers and illegal aliens have already left for home and more are leaving every day; even the slaves are bailing out.
Facebook has already jumped the shark, so their build-out in Silicon Valley will become even more vacant space in the near future. Green energy was planned to be the next boom but it's stillborn so the hard times in the valley are going to continue for now.
Really - if you're thinking of moving to Silicon Valley from out of state - stop now. The chances of employment are very slim and the expense of living there is very high; the best you could do is submit resumes until you run out of money. You're better off almost anywhere else.
Jerry Sanders is back!
I love how this was modded up. Slashdot has gone to the fucking dogs.
You're telling me to add things up for 24x7x365. Right there you fucked up because there aren't 7x365 days in a year. There are just 365 (and a quarter to be more exact).
So it's 365.26*24....now multiply by 3 and that's the number of kilowatt hours you're talking about. 8766 kilowatt hours.
Now have a look at the average household usage here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_use_kwh_per_customer_2000-05.PNG
Most of the households averages here exceed the figure calculated. So tell me again how the GP was right.
The moderators who modded you up and you yourself are lazy and stupid.
As for 2TB drives in datacenters I wasn't suggesting he go pick up a drive at his local Walmart and you know you're misrepresenting that too. What I was saying is that this also isn't a particularly large figure the average user doesn't have any idea how to grasp as the GP suggested.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Like the Toyota-Tesla deal--and a thousand animated Starbucks conversations that I hear every day, where only depression and silence ruled last year--this is sign that the Valley is not only heating up but poised to drag the entire world economy out of the doldrums. Facebook is only one customer of bandwidth, and I doubt that it will vanish off the planet any time soon. Yeah, I'm a bull on this town (mine), but history is with me on this. It's the highly-educated people, stupid.
Notice, it's not just *anywhere* in Sili Valley -- it's in the city of Santa Clara. Santa Clara has a municipal power company, with cheap (some would say under priced) electricity. They would not build the same thing in Sunnyvale or San Jose, at PG&E prices.
But we have this thing called the Internet [wikipedia.org] which means it is no longer necessary to put data centers anywhere near the customers or engineers.
Gee that's sure Interesting but sometimes physical access to a server is cheaper, or is part of the business model, or is required by law. At the last place I worked, one major customer demanded they administer some servers inside a locked cage to protect sensitive information on hard drives.
I wonder if this article is a troll for the Greatest Fool. Haven't we all been here before?
There is plenty of empty and abandoned commercial real estate in Silicon Valley as well as in such IT outsourcing hotbeds as Beijing.
About 2 years ago they started to build a 350,000 sq ft data center right next door to us. They lost their funding and ran with a skeleton crew for around a year and now the funding has come back they have resumed full scale building and expect to have the first half ready for customers in the next month or so. There are currently over 600 construction workers on this site.
We are located about 40 miles from New York City. There are a couple of data center projects that I am aware of in this area. They are building in this area to specifically target Wall Street and Financial institutions. Their systems require very low latency (I heard 10ms) and these companies want to keep their trusted staff. Moving 30-50 miles out of the city will reduce their costs compared to being in the city and it will still allow them to meet their latency and keep their most trusted employees. Moving to some remote location where power & space are cheap is really not an option for these customers.
Anybody saying to just convert some existing office space has not seen this type of data center. This building is all about the power and cooling. They have their own power sub-station, 16 diesel locomotive size generators on the roof, a half dozen 100ft square chillers, and a couple of million gallon water tower to run the chillers until the cooling system can recycle after a power outage. The building itself is secondary. It would likely cost more to try to retro-fit all of these systems into an existing building than to just assemble the pre-fab concrete walls to make a new building.
Santa Clara's city council has been pushing heavily to build a ballpark to steal teams from San Francisco and maybe Oakland, and it's looking like the voters will approve it this fall. They're not a big enough town to afford the few hundred million dollars of city money it'll take, so it's going to get squeezed out of something.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sacramento's two hours away if you avoid rush hour, 1ms by fiber, doesn't have earthquakes, and if you stay out of the flood zones it's pretty safe, and real estate's less outrageously priced. So your engineers and suppliers can be in Silicon Valley, but still go into the data center when you need them to, and your infrastructure's more reliable as long as you consult with a bunch of fiber providers first.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
... then build one. What's stopping you?
Until then, quit telling others how to conduct their business.
And they're all right there in the Valley, even though they're building the stuff in China or Malaysia. You'll need a few rocket scientists and a bunch of managers, but you're going to farm out most of the construction and setup work and have a smaller staff for ongoing hands-on operations.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My company has two main data centers. Both in different states from where our main headquarters are located.
I can run a list of reasons why a DC in the Valley is stupid, top three are:
1) Cost of power in CA.
2) Natural disaster threat.
3) Cost of real estate.
Go somewhere that isn't on a fault line, has cheap power, and cheap land.