Slashdot Mirror
Data Centers Coming To a City Near You (datacenterfrontier.com)
1sockchuck writes: There are more wired businesses than ever in towns and cities across America. That's why the data center industry is coming to smaller cities you may not think of as technology hubs. Industry executives say the convergence of cloud computing, Big Data and the Internet of Things will require data centers in many places outside the traditional "Big Six" markets (Northern Virginia, New York/New Jersey, Chicago, Dallas, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles). "We're seeing success in the Tier 2 markets," said Kevin Bostick of 365 Data Centers, which operates in markets like Buffalo, Nashville and Pittsburgh. "We feel very confident with our ability to grow in these markets, especially given what we've seen over the past six months." Commercial real estate brokers confirm the trend, citing strong interest in the Pacific Northwest (especially Portland).
The Pacific Northwest seems like a reasonably good choice for data centers, at least for serving this corner of the country. Lots of clean, cheap hydro power, near major tech industry in Seattle area, and there's plenty of water for cooling.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Why building datacenters ? Let's put everything in the cloud instead ! (irony inside)
Will there ever be small-scale, self-storage type data centers?
Most of the data centers I've been in are large and elaborate affairs, with extensive security systems, a dozen or more (that I could see) on site staff, and all the requisite complexity of systems that allows them to house 10s of thousands of square feet of racks.
This scale and complexity comes at a price, though, which often seems to price out SMBs looking for just an incrementally more reliable place to house offsite systems than the overloaded literal closets they use at the office with dodgy cooling, limited UPS-only power outage time and often limited availability of redundant high speed internet due to carrier/geographic availability.
It kind of makes me wonder if there's room for a more simplified, smaller-scale data center that might offer better facilities than the SMB office will ever have but not the kind of intensive scale and complexity of a typical, high-end data center. Like providing generator power within 5 minutes of an outage, but not providing whole-building UPS redundancy, less elaborate security systems, perhaps 2-3 upstream Internet providers versus a mini-NAP, etc.
This would make going off-site for a lot of SMBs or even hobbyists more affordable. I realize "the cloud" is supposed to shoulder some of this burden, but doing a lot of stuff in the cloud is more expensive and troublesome than a roll-your-own second site in a simplified facility might be.
You could even look at retrofitting existing self-storage buildings.
tfs seems surprised portland is a hotbed for data centers. duh, the big guys are there with big operations, what did you expect?
Data Centers Coming To a City Near You
There are no cities near me. Back to the click-bait headline drawing board.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
FTFA:
This is being driven by two trends:
Not exactly the same forces that drove the movement from large, centralized mainframes to small, distributed desktop computers, but really, didn't we see this coming all along?
There are tons of DC's that have maybe a couple guys on days and an on call. L3 and the likes has no manged services DC's. You can easily get a rack with 20a 110v for under a grand a month (a decent hunk of that price is power/cooling). Lots of places offer half and quarter racks. A quarter rack is about as small as you can go where there is customer access since it's about as small as you can make it. Piles of places will let you ship a 1ru where they and stack it for you for a very nominal fee.
No sir I dont like it.
It's unusual for the Rt. 128 Ring (including Boston and Cambridge) to not be included in a list of the top technology hubs in the U.S.
Las Vegas is not considered a big data-center hub, but Switch has had several large data-centers here, and the previous record-holder for the largest data-center in the world here for a few years...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
The problem was this is expensive. In particular you generally have one or more very expensive persons who main duty it is to keep up the computers, which was not normally a full time job, except if computers started failing in bulk, when there was enough people to get it fixed quickly.
Back then there was no standard solution. I recall when the first compaq adaptive load balancer was installed. It seemed a competitive advantage could be gained with the right combination of hardware and custom software. Now there does not appear to be any advantage at small scales. These types of servers are routine and we know what works and doesn't. There is no reason to run hardware when software or sales is the business. Even, for the most part, people used canned software unless their business is software.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
We're lucky... such SMB rack-em-up places are common in my market (Kansas City) and have been for multiple boom-bust cycles. DataShack, Joe's Data Center, Wholesale Internet, JC Host, etc. Older office spaces, no raised floors or anything. Usually just Hurricane and Cogent bandwidth.
I do production sites on more normal "cloud" providers, because it's great not to have to drive to the DC for a dead fan at 2am.
But, for backups, development VMs, docker playground, VMs, etc, etc, I keep a near-consumer-grade (i.e., no redundant power supply) 4U box, stuffed with consumer-grade SATA 2TB drives (in RAID 6), in one of those cheapy DCs for under $50 a month. Gives me a lot of functionality that would cost a crap-ton more than $50 a month to replicate with AWS or DigitalOcean.
Any decent-sized city already has dozens of datacenters. Any large city probably has hundreds. Data centers are kind of like parking lots.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
In my city (Ottawa), we have a few such datacenters. They'll have one guy working the sign-in desk in the daytime, and I think they're on call after-hours. They have biometric access doors, so anyone with a private rack or cage can come and go as they please. I never counted, but I'd estimate maybe 250 racks or so. It's pretty small. Now, they are not exactly cheap, but we Canadians love to get financially sodomized by our ISPs, or so I've been led to believe.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
In a way, that makes sense. If one can get a decent, peered network feed in a smaller town, locating a data center out in a fairly rural area may be an idea. It might be costly to make sure parts are on hand for the PDUs, CRACs, HVAC, but building security is a solved problem (armed guard or two, HID badge, PROTEC2 locks in case the badge access fails, add whatever security theater one feels like.)
The funny thing, it might add some synergy locating a data center in a smaller town:
1: You can sell computer parts there, because there will be someone in that area who will drive to a store (which will have at least a clerk and a guard manning it) to buy PC parts.
2: A modern data center doesn't need much staffing, but being able to recruit/train locals in computer/network training only will help things.
3: You can provide services (assuming a decent backhaul) from the data center to local businesses. If other stores are close enough to string fiber, they now can get services like 10gigE to a SAN or NAS. Then, the local businesses can use something like Windows Server Essentials or MS DPM, and the local server at the store can dump all the data onto an iSCSI volume at the data center (and with BitLocker turned on, all data would be transparantly encrypted.)
4: Coloc service can be useful as well. There are a few SMBs which want at least a half rack somewhere physically secret for a warm/hot recovery center.
5: Realistically, small towns tend to be more secure and have less crime than bigger area. Yes, there are the tweakers, but incidents are just a lot less than in more urban areas. There are also less worries about terrorism, riots, and other items that plague more populated areas.
6: Generators and UPSes are not that expensive relatively. In fact, coupled with throwing some solar panels on a roof, it is part of doing business. Plus, small towns tend to have better diesel mechanics in general, due to the farm equipment needed in the region.
7: A small town is cooler than a large city with its heat island effect. It may just be 5-10 degrees, but that is 5-10 degrees less that has to be cooled.
8: With WAN replication of SANs, coupled with an on site tape operator, the small town data center can be an effecient place to store backups. Add a room where tapes are stored, and the need for Iron Mountain will be minimal.
tl;dr... small town data centers do make a lot of sense.
Every state government has corruption problems. Some just hide it better, unlike New Jersey or Nevada.
And Eastern Washington, as with Northern Idaho and Western Montana, has a lot of xenophobic racists. Maybe you're one of them.
(I read about this on the net, so almost all of the details may be wrong.) There's some company in Norway or somewhere that has a business model of putting small datacenter units into people's homes, with a narrow rack of computers and storage, using them as electric heaters, which reduces their HVAC and real estate costs and takes advantage of fiber infrastructure.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But, for backups, development VMs, docker playground, VMs, etc, etc, I keep a near-consumer-grade (i.e., no redundant power supply) 4U box, stuffed with consumer-grade SATA 2TB drives (in RAID 6), in one of those cheapy DCs for under $50 a month. Gives me a lot of functionality that would cost a crap-ton more than $50 a month to replicate with AWS or DigitalOcean.
That's exactly the kind of cost point I'm thinking of -- I think that works out to about $500/rack, $250/half rack. At those kinds of prices, many of the SMBs I work with would be pretty eager to colocate equipment for backup, DR or HA purposes.
There's just a whole universe of SMBs with infrastructure running on premises for whom the costs, limitations or functionality of public cloud or high-end colocation is just not workable and for whom facility limitations make ISP redundancy, generators, etc unobtainable or just too expensive.
A $10k or $15k investment in a mid-range Dell ESXi host with ~10 TB of RAID-6 + hotspare would prevent reasonable redundancy, some offsite backup/replication and could probably come out as a wash in terms of cost when you start doing the math on extra hardware, licensing, etc. for single-site HA.
Absolute. Their agenda is covered up by labels like datacenters or 'cyber security hype, and unless people know what the real agenda is and who is doing it all, they are blind in a dangerous dark. They make it all sound like convenience and 'progress', another propaganda word. If you think mind rape and mass murder is progress, then keep sitting. links in post above show the picture.
The problem with a self-storage type arrangement is the difficulty in securing them. For example, cutting through the sheet metal wall between units is simple, and there's no one there to (a) notice, or (b) try to stop you. Most storage units are filled with moderately useless junk, so no one bothers to break into them. When you have thousands of dollars worth of servers (and priceless data) in there, thieves will take notice.
(This isn't new, either. Unattended DC's have been broken into many times. Rarely making the national news, however.)