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The New Data Center Capital of America

Posted by samzenpus on from the new-look dept.

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."

13 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. skunkpost, on the other hand, by pepax · · Score: 5, Funny

    not being hosted in the state-of-the-art facility, has its server on fire

  2. Silicon valley.... by catbutt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Silicon valley.... by coryking · · Score: 4, Funny

      I agree with your concerns. Many Silicon Valley startups have taken to using expensive Monster Brand DVI cables to link the computers in Buffalo with the monitors in the Valley.

      That said, many techies claim you can just use ordinary lamp cord for the DVI signal, true techies know that Monster Cable uses sophisticated techniques to cut out jitter and chromatic abnormalities often introduced in transit over the Sierra Nevada mountain range. I personally would not hire an admin who did not use monster cabling.

      Some have taken to frame-grabbing. They capture the screen in Buffalo several times second, compress the image using sophisticated algorithms such as GIF89 or TIFF, and the send them using ordinary phone lines as pulses of one or zero. It is very expensive, and only the most well funded start-ups use this technique.

  3. Not as cool as it used to be by eln · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Not as cool as it used to be by FuckingNickName · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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

      This explains why 10 years ago the admin helped you out, and today you help out the admin.

      Remind me not to host any nontrivial systems where your philosophy manages the data centre. I want skilled people working quickly where the problem is going to happen, not slowly by trying to troubleshoot 1000 miles away.

    2. Re:Not as cool as it used to be by coryking · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you are running a massive data center that hosts a webfarm, cloud cluster, or some other large horizontally scaled computing project and require highly technical staff troubleshooting individual machines onsite, your process and application is completely screwed up. A well designed, horizontally scaled app should not fail if multiple machines go down.

      At the scale of Yahoo, Google or facebook, they probably dont even bother to troubleshoot a machine that is even hinting at questionable behavior. They just yank it off the load balancer and have some unskilled dude take the machine, dump it, and put in a new one.

      If you have a massive failure of your system, short of a natural disaster it ain't a hardware issue or a server issue. It is an application bug that require software engineers to fix. They don't have to be at the datacenter, they just create a patch from the comfort of their normal office (or home) and push it out to production.

  4. Re:Buffalo, New York by catbutt · · Score: 4, Informative

    Buffalo NY has over 250,000 population. The next highest I can find is about 4000.

    So I'm confused as to why you think anyone would be confused.

  5. They don't have NIAGARA FALLS though by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  6. Canada is where it should be by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. Buffalo has good ping times by inhuman.games · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  8. Yeah, right. by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Yeah, right. by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Is that actual open air? Wouldn't dirt and water in the air start causing problems?

      It's probably not open air. My guess is that they have air-to-air heat exchangers behind all those grills, so the heat is dumped into the cold ambient air. Mostly the same air goes round and round in the data center, which keeps the humidity in range. So there's not much work for the chillers; mostly it's just fans.

  9. Really, Really Need A Job? by b4upoo · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.