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The New Data Center Capital of America
crimeandpunishment writes "Move over Silicon Valley, here comes... Buffalo. Where the weather might actually be a big advantage. The recent opening of Yahoo's state-of-the-art data center, which uses the region's cooler climate and a high-tech 'chicken coop' design to dramatically lower energy costs is getting a lot of attention in the industry."
not being hosted in the state-of-the-art facility, has its server on fire
was never really known for being a "data center", it's more known for where engineering and development happen.
Data centers don't really need that many highly skilled employees working on site. In the future data centers might have no one employed but security guards and (relatively unskilled) maintainance. In that case it doesn't really matter where they are located, at least in terms of helping the economics of the region.
They should think about into north dakota too. I mean let's face it it's cold as sh!@ there as well and that whole state could use some jobs.
For those who are curious, the article is about data centers in Buffalo, New York, and not one of the other many Buffalos in the USA.
Well, why stop at Buffalo? We have lots of cheap land in Northern Canada where you would need no cooling for most of the year!!!!
It used be that having people build data centers in your community meant lots of good jobs. These days, though, with advances in lights out management, you can build a huge data center and only need a few low-pay button pushers and forklift drivers on site. All of the high paid engineer and admin positions can be staffed anywhere, and usually end up being primarily existing staff who remain wherever they're already living.
Sure having some jobs coming in is better than no jobs coming in, but data centers alone are not going to transform a community into a high tech mecca any more than building a bunch of warehouses will.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo?
(Yes, I have karma to burn)
^_^
So, per my subject-line above? Yes folks: We "upstate N.Y.'ers" can thank the GREAT Nikola Tesla for his creation of the Niagara Falls power turbine system (sends power as far as to NY City too, afaik/iirc)...
That cheap power? It was "part of the package" they used to attract YAHOO & others, along with tax incentives & plenty of cheap land: CHEAP electrical power via "hydro-power"!!!
APK
Cheap hydro power, no summers ( well actually that is not true we had summer last year, it happened on a Thursday). You can also use the excess heat to warm up the parking garage of the employees because the cars will blow their frost plugs even if they are plugged into block heaters and the batteries will freeze if they don't have an electric blanket around them. -60c (-100c with wind chill) is horrible, most people run their cars 24/7 when it gets really cold.
Any picture of this"data center" available on a website ?
conseil en organisation |
Geographically speaking, I think Buffalo is better than Silicon Valley for a server -- if you have European customers. My server in Buffalo had good latency for users in both North America and Europe. My server in Silicon Valley had worse latency for my European users. I'm surprised there aren't more data centers in the New York area.
First off, where did they get that picture of a bunch of mini-tower machines on steel shelving, each with one Ethernet cable, one power cord, and one console connection, sitting on raised floor? That looks like clip art of some data center circa 1998. Here's the actual Yahoo data center in Lockport, which, as you'd expect, is a big farm of 1U rackmounts. The "chicken coop" design is simply a low-cost prefabricated metal building with lots of ventilation grills. Looks like something ordered out of the Butler Buildings catalog.
Yahoo got $9 million in grants and 10 years of no taxes for this. Yet it will employ only 125 people. Probably less, once it's running.
Lockport is desperate. The big employer in town, Delphi Harrison Thermal Systems (formerly Harrison Radiator) had 6000 employees a decade ago. Now it has 2100, and has been threatened with closure several times.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/092010-yahoo-opens-chicken-coop-green.html although the original link does a great job of showcasing local boosterism in a rust belt town feverishly hopeful for a better future ('Yay! 100 jobs! Some interest! The town is saved, paw'!), this link actually has details more likely to be of interest to a slashdot reader. The long and narrow design placed in consideration of prevailing winds seems clever, sure, but I don't get the big deal over it. Maybe using common sense really is so rare as to be considered innovative.
you have to be kidding me. the earthquake you linked happened in canada:
"The midday earthquake measured a magnitude of 5.0, and while centered 35 miles outside the Canadian capital of Ottawa, it sent tremors through Western New York and at least eight U.S. states. Locally, the rumbling rattled residents from Springville to Lewiston."
buffalo is hardly an active earthquake zone
... but the rest of America is still sore at those four consecutive Super Bowls you guys made us sit through with your losing teams.
Maybe they can convert Ralph Wilson stadium into a data center once the Bills relocate to Toronto?
Skilled help may be needed by these new data centers. So all they have to do is talk high quality employees into the joys of living in Buffalo. If the cold doesn't kill you and boredom doesn't finish you off the state income taxes may have you wander about hoping that you will freeze to death.
goo'gl it!
The yearly power cutting snow storms? Tornado's? Flooding of nearby areas? Buffalo is hardly safe from natural disaster. Someone probably just thought "lets go north, nothing ever happens up there" and their yes men agreed and here we are.
We had a long hot Summer this year in Toronto, It's only really cooled down in the past couple of weeks.
Not sure where the "no Summer" business comes from. Even Winter only lasts 4 months in TO.
you had me at #!
You mean Anchor Bar, on Main St.? There's a Wendy's right next door?
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
100 jobs may not seem that much, but for small town it is significant. It means, 100 people plus probably another 50 to 90 spouses + another 20 to 100 kids (all numbers pulled out of my ass) will either continue to stay there, or better, move in. That's at least another 200 people extra. This means that schools, shops, petrol stations, the post office etc. can still remain open and the town won't turn into a one garage ghost town. Most of them will also want their own houses, so that's another benefit to the local economy.
So Eastman Kodak misses yet another opportunity?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
People you don't know, from companies that don't exist. A group of entities that never was. The industry exists only to put interest in things, new and happening things you have never heard of. In this case it is "a lot".
Join "The Industry" today, and disappear into the ether.
For guarding these (not that I like the idea):
"South Korea's Machine Gun Sentry Robot"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YftEAbmMQ
And see James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" (1979) for a good depiction of maintenance drones that repair and extend a computer network.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=28
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm
So, in the long term, there are even fewer jobs from this than you pessimistically (but accurately) predict.
We need to rethink the fundamentals of an economy based on the idea of work-or-starve even as our economy can produce endless goods and services easily now using robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks... Some ideas I put together on that are here:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The data center is not actually in Buffalo but rather some distance to the East in Lockport. In additional to the climate advantages, I'm sure Yahoo is getting some nice tax rebates considering the depressed economic situation of the area and the production at the local Delphi plant which was the biggest employer in the salad days.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Mmm... Duff's.
Anchor Bar is hugely popular in the area, and there's even a second Anchor Bar restaurant at the Buffalo airport. They sell the sauce in grocery stores (I don't know how widely they're distributed, but I believe they have them in Wegmans in Rochester, don't know about Syracuse).
Really it shouldn't take much to do really well here in Buffalo. Locally-owned restaurants are a particularly lucrative business, I imagine, since there's so little else to do in the area and some of the national chains (which are crap compared to these local places) are closing down around here.
That said, I went to school in Rochester (UR) and then grad school in California - I'm only back in Buffalo, where I grew up, "living in my mom's basement" as it were until I can find a job. It won't be a job in the Buffalo area... it's really not a great place to live, at least for me.
As someone else noted - this is an obvious place to build things like datacenters, because not only is it cold, but literally most of the buildings are vacant, at least in Buffalo itself (some of the suburbs are doing a lot better) and rent is cheap.
Locating near any power plant, whether it be coal or hydro, will get you huge discounts in power costs, because the utility doesn't have to support a grid to get it to you, and your demand load is pretty predictable.
Any northern climate will do better in terms of natural air cooling, but Buffalo is a poor choice on that front, because all the weather sweeping in over the Great Lakes makes the air quite humid. You want dry cold air for maximum cooling effectiveness.
...Upstate NY weather recognized as an advantage.
Obnoxiously hot always did seem to bother me more than obnoxiously cold; I suppose that would hold even more true for servers that needed to be cooled as well.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Lockport isn't even a suburb of Buffalo.
The Internet sucks in Canada, that's why. It's slow and expensive, just like our 20th century trains.
1 data center gets built and they are calling themselves the data center capital of the country? Well, Salt Lake just opened EBAY last summer and has Oracle, Twitter, and a 1.3 Billion dollar data center for the NSA under construction and we don't feel qualified to make that statement. You don't see NC claiming that because of the apple one... with the tax rate of New York I hardly see that many businesses moving there!