Actually your not that far off the mark. Building a data center basically comes down to five key components:
1. Getting lots of cheap power. Being next to a power plant with tons of extra capacity doesn't hurt. The farther you are, the more loss, and that means more $$$ per MW. 2. Internet pipes. Having X thousand servers up and running with nowhere to push the bits is pretty useless. I'm not sure if most people understand how hard it is to say get 40-60 Gig of bandwidth to the middle of nowhere. It takes months, if not years, to put in the right infrastructure. If you think I'm lying, call up say, Sprint and ask them for a 10GE pipe to the middle of Iowa but be careful, thier laughter might hurt your ears. 3. Cheap labor. Gotta have bodies to run everything from cooling to electric to security. You could do it with Robots, but after a while, as with all robots, they want to kill. 4. Favorable tax status. When you install hundreds of millions of dollars of hardware in one place, the amount of taxes you pay on it becomes non trivial. Many companies work out sweet tax deals with the local governments for just this reason. Basically the conversation goes, "You give us cheap tax treatment, we give you 500 jobs." 5. And of course, cheap land. Pretty self explanitory.
Because of small number of sites that are favorable in all these ways, I'm not surprised that costs have increased. But like all things this will change. Places with the last 3 bullets will build out power and connectivity and the datacenters will pop up all over the midwest. Either there or we'll outsource them to India.
Exactly. NOTHING is inappropriate!
Tubgirl begs to differ.
...where was Dick Cheney during all of this?
i ncident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney_hunting_
Thats a pretty bad analogy. Show me a car or a house that I can download through gnutella for free.....
Actually your not that far off the mark. Building a data center basically comes down to five key components:
1. Getting lots of cheap power. Being next to a power plant with tons of extra capacity doesn't hurt. The farther you are, the more loss, and that means more $$$ per MW.
2. Internet pipes. Having X thousand servers up and running with nowhere to push the bits is pretty useless. I'm not sure if most people understand how hard it is to say get 40-60 Gig of bandwidth to the middle of nowhere. It takes months, if not years, to put in the right infrastructure. If you think I'm lying, call up say, Sprint and ask them for a 10GE pipe to the middle of Iowa but be careful, thier laughter might hurt your ears.
3. Cheap labor. Gotta have bodies to run everything from cooling to electric to security. You could do it with Robots, but after a while, as with all robots, they want to kill.
4. Favorable tax status. When you install hundreds of millions of dollars of hardware in one place, the amount of taxes you pay on it becomes non trivial. Many companies work out sweet tax deals with the local governments for just this reason. Basically the conversation goes, "You give us cheap tax treatment, we give you 500 jobs."
5. And of course, cheap land. Pretty self explanitory.
Because of small number of sites that are favorable in all these ways, I'm not surprised that costs have increased. But like all things this will change. Places with the last 3 bullets will build out power and connectivity and the datacenters will pop up all over the midwest. Either there or we'll outsource them to India.
ez
just testing