China Building City For Cloud Computing

CWmike writes "First it was China's 'big hole' sighting that brought us the supercomputing race. Now China is building a city-sized cloud computing and office complex that will include a mega data center, one of the projects fueling that country's double-digit growth in IT spending. The entire complex will cover some 6.2 million square feet, with the initial data center space accounting for approximately 646,000 square feet, says IBM, which is collaborating with a Chinese company to build it. A Sputnik moment? Patrick Thibodeau reports that these big projects, whether supercomputers or sprawling software development office parks, can garner a lot of attention. But China's overall level of IT spending, while growing rapidly, is only one-fifth that of the US."

Comments

How convient

[antifoidulus]

Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and the government can then threaten to cut me off from said data unless I pay them a bribe! I can get all this for slightly less than I'm paying now! I'd be a fool not to!

Re:How convient

[arivanov]

Almost spot on.

You forgot the regular bribe to the party official in charge of the facility so he does not sell access to your data to your competitor as well as bribes for everyone and everything under him for this same reason.

It is quite funny when people call China communist. It is capitalism taken to the ultimate limit where anything and everything is for sale with very few of the moral restrictions which the West has inherited from the 20 centuries of its "Sunday school" upbringing.

Re:How convient

[VortexCortex]

Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and...

...my encrypted data still won't make a lick of sense to anyone but me!
"I'd be a fool not to" use encryption.

Re:How convient

[antifoidulus]

Except for the fact that they still own the physical hardware, a lot of papers have been published that pretty much state that it's actually not very difficult to get the encryption keys to a running system if you have control of the hardware. So yeah, encryption isn't nearly as useful in this situation as you would think.

Re:How convient

[Lazareth]

Depends really on how you're handling the encryption. If the encrypted data at all times is stored in an encrypted state on site and a remote computer only ever requests encrypted parts of the data, only decrypting and handling it locally, it suddenly becomes a whole lot harder for the owner of the datacenter to fuck you over.

Sure, if you're just doing a l33t SSH tunnel to a linux based remote system, log into and decrypt your protected home folder, then you're pretty much decrypting it for those who has access to the hardware.

Re:How convient

[plasticsquirrel]

Why do you think that this new cloud system has anything to do with you, or that they would try to appeal to you? Chinese networks and Chinese websites rarely have English equivalents, or attempt to provide them. It seems a bit self-centered and presumptuous to think that this "cloud" is an overblown trap aimed squarely at you. We don't even know if its services will be open to the Chinese public, much less foreigners.

Re:How convient

[LS]

Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and the government can then threaten to cut me off from said data unless I pay them a bribe! I can get all this for slightly less than I'm paying now! I'd be a fool not to!

Do you seriously think that other data centers in China are not directly accessible by the government?

Forget Death Rays

[dmomo]

Who needs one when you can build a City-sized DOS cannon.

1/5 of spending?

[shutdown -p now]

Who cares about the absolute figure, anyway, it's the bang for the buck that's important. Soviet space program was cheaper than US one as well.

Re:1/5 of spending?

[c0lo]

Who cares about the absolute figure, anyway, it's the bang for the buck that's important. Soviet space program was cheaper than US one as well.

That's right. Not the cost is important, but the profit.

Awesome

[ZirconCode]

And in two years it will be just as obsolete as square feet.

A Sputnik moment?

[billstewart]

Or a Dubai Tower moment?

Just muscle politics

[gweihir]

Software is more important than hardware today. The whole cloud computing movement shows that in many cases hardware is just a cheap commodity. This datacenter is some politicians building themselves a monument and pretending to be ahead or at least on the same level with the west. This is just a lot of hot air, but otherwise quite irrelevant. Building a large datacenter is pretty easy, once you have the cash, and does not show any level of technological sophistication.

"One Fifth" may not be as small as it looks..

[ikejam]

One fifth of the US IT spending may buy a lot more in China.... both in labour and in material...

6 million square feet...

[jpapon]

My buddy is a commercial real estate agent in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park/Sunnyvale (so, Silicon Valley) area, and let me tell you, there's ALOT more than 6 million square feet of office space available to rent. The number may sound impressive, but it's nothing compared to what they have in Northern California alone. I mean, the Oracle campus in Redwood City is over 4 million square feet all by itself.

Of course, it's not about the space, but what you do with it...

Is it located in one of their "ghost cities"?

[jbarr]

Obviously off-topic, but interesting and wonderful fodder for the tin-foil hat crowd

It appears that China has built several cities meant to house millions of people, yet they remain completely empty:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339536/Ghost-towns-China-Satellite-images-cities-lying-completely-deserted.html
http://www.libertynewsonline.com/article_340_30137.php