Slashdot Log In
Amazon's Cloud Data Center To Follow Google To Oregon
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Nov 08, 2008 07:26 PM
from the pretty-state dept.
from the pretty-state dept.
1sockchuck writes "All your online data doesn't really live in a big, fluffy cloud. It resides in servers and data centers. That's why Amazon.com is quietly building a large data center complex in Oregon along the Columbia River, not far from Google's secret data lair in The Dalles. Amazon Web Services started as a way to monetize excess data center capacity for its retail operation, but has grown to the point where it requires dedicated infrastructure. Amazon recently said that its S3 cloud storage service is hosting 29 billion objects."
Related Stories
[+]
Technology: Google's Secretive Data Center 391 comments
valdean wrote in with a NYTimes article about Google which says "On the banks of the windswept Columbia River [in Oregon], Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky...' What's the goal of this new complex? Expanding Google's raw computer power. It's one more piece in the Googleplex, the massive global computer network that is estimated to span 25 locations and 450,000 servers.'
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
I feel a slight sense of jealousy (Score:5, Interesting)
On an Ecological level I hope electricity in Oregon is mainly nuclear, wind or Hydro....
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
IIRC, its hydro. Cheap "green" electricity why its becoming prime data center territory.
Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
missile silo! a /. nurd's ultimate bachelor pad?
Re: (Score:2)
That's interesting. I suppose that you could make it a lot cheaper if you used the right kind of cooling...I just wonder what the local effects would be if you pumped the entire datacenter's heat output into the surrounding rocks. I wonder if they'd be able to keep up, or if their ambient temperature would end up being much higher.
Interesting idea, I just wouldn't want to experiment with a datacenter. I do dig the idea of housing computers in a missile silo, though. You've just got to watch out for Deep Cro [wikia.com]
Use the thermal difference directly (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My layman's guess would be the ambient temperature underground is lower overall, so while the equipment would indeed still generate heat you could just use venting to disperse most of the heat throughout the rest of the facility and it wouldn't affect things too much. The entire silo would be like one giant heatsink.
Re: (Score:2)
I just wonder if the rock would effectively transfer and distribute the heat, or if the ambient temperature would eventually rise to meet the average output of the data center.
For google, we might be talking about magma ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
For google, we might be talking about magma ;-)
Here is a photographer (rooftop65 [flickr.com]) based in The Dalles, known to get a good shot or two of the Google data center.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually talking to someone who worked construction one one he said it is pretty difficult to raise the temp above 63-65 degrees in them due to the depth. They also have plenty of large vent shafts to ensure fresh outside air,and they were built on the sides of hills which have very good fresh airflow which could be further used for cooling.
Also the missile shaft itself has floors at around 20 feet and continue every 20 feet all the way to the top for working on the missile. You could easily add metal grid
Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy (Score:5, Informative)
.On an Ecological level I hope electricity in Oregon is mainly nuclear, wind or Hydro....
Yes, Hydro. Thats the main reason these companies are moving their data centers to Oregon: The availability of cheap and plentiful hydro power.
Lots of dark fiber that is well connected, as well as tax breaks, also help.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The availability of cheap and plentiful hydro power.
Lots of dark fiber that is well connected, as well as tax breaks, also help.
There are a bunch of States with good connections and cheap power.
It's almost always the tax breaks that make or break a company's decision to build in a specific place.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Oregon happens to have a very gentle sloping shelf at the ocean. Oregon also doesn't have a large amount of shipping traffic, with their nasty anchors. This makes it ideal to run an underwater fiber across the pacific. There are a ton of fibers going across the Pacific ocean from the state. (it is really strange to see a multi-gigabit fiber landing in a small ocean side town where they have difficulty getting anything but dial-up connections!) Oregon also has huge power lines, running right to the sites
Re: (Score:2)
However the upper Columbia watershed has lost a lot of jobs due to the Aluminum industry collapsing in part due to power losses a few years ago. Low water combined with high temps and high demand in California redir
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
mainly hydro, some natural gas - http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/oregon.pdf [doe.gov]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is one of the advantages of remote data storage. If you keep your backups and have someone else far away keeping you data too. Then if something big happens Say say a Hurricane your data is still safe. Unlike someone who may have an excellent backup plan, however they get hit with a big disaster and a complete wipe out of their data is possible. The cost of say $1,000,000 of hardware is nothing compared to say a couple of terabytes of data.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
yea, data redundancy and backups are useless if you don't use off-site data protection for disaster recovery. even small businesses can greatly benefit from geographical redundancy.
even though the label i work at is based in California, we still took a major hit from Hurricane Katrina because the masters for several albums in our back catalog were kept at a recording studio that got flooded. after that happened, my boss starting holding onto copies of the masters himself here at the office and also backing
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As a hosted application provider, we provide no less than THREE separate geographical locations for DR of the data: the redundant, primary hosting cluster, a smaller, backup hosting cluster, and a non-hosted "if it gets this bad it's really, really bad" backup. Offsite backups happen automatically every night, so at any point, you'll never lose more than 24 hours worth of data. We've always offered this level of redundancy.
In a few months, we'll bring this 24 hour maximum latency down to less than 5 minutes
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds like your plan is similar to mine, with the exception of the deltas for time. We're going to be getting 10Mb between our primary and secondary, as opposed to the 1.5Mb T1 we have right now, but they could be on the same network and it would still take me half an hour to do an rsync because it's got to index the files.
I'm currently keeping 1.3 million files (~450GB) in sync over that T1. Fortunately, there are usually only a few dozen GB a day, but sometimes there are more. It's madness, but we're
A little background (Score:2)
The a great deal of Oregon's electricity is generated by the Columbia River dams. While massive hydro power generation is "greener" than, say, coal power, it's also extraordinarily destructive to the environment upriver from the dams.
Hydro power is also controversial because dams tend to reduce fish runs and, under Oregon law, native tribes are guaranteed the right to fish. This has become as real point of contention, as environmental activists and the tribes have maintained that a healthy river is a prereq
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
All your online data doesn't really live in a big, fluffy cloud.
What? Now he tells me.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Damn - now I've got Little Fluffy Clouds [youtube.com] buzzing round my tiny brain.
Haven't listened to that track in years.
Still, at least I'll go to sleep in a good frame of mind...
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
(Even then, of course, you wouldn't really be "in the cloud" you'd be essentially storing your data in other people's routers; but the image isn't nearly as funny that way.)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, your data is in an even better place. When they allocated your space, the big fluffy cloud was full, so your data is on little puffy bunny tails.
These places are designed to be risk-averse (Score:2)
Real estate (Score:3, Insightful)
Compared to California [century21.com] property is also cheap [windermere.com] for now. If you want to recruit workers who know what they're doing and pay them under $150k, that's a plus.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah the bandwagon approach. That usually works out of everyone.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? The entire area is near a subduction zone capable of producing earthquakes similar to the Good Friday quake that hit Alaska in 1964. These "megathrust" quakes tend to be MORE severe than the strike-slip quakes that occur in California. The last such quake in this area is thought to have occured circa 1700, IIRC, and caused a tsunami that was large enough to kill people in Japan after crossing the Pacific. The same plate interaction is also responsible for volcanism in that area. I don't know ab
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah except they seem not to remember the flood of 1947 that wiped out the Portland/Vancouver suburb of Vanport. Plus, right there next to active volcanoes... Make you wonder why they didn't build it inn the crated or Mt. St Helens. Or at least up next to Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. At least there you'd get the Lodge from The Shining to look at as you wander the dark corridors of the creepy volcano-dwelling data center.
Well, hopefully they have good insurance.
of course, objects (Score:3, Insightful)
Can someone explain what an "object" is?
Re: (Score:2)
Can someone explain what an "object" is?
If you're expected to come over each night, but you're not welcome in the morning... you.
Re: (Score:2)
A piece of data addressable by a unique key. not unlike a file.
ill bite (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It allows them to report a hello world at the same level as each link in a link-chained list of xml streams each at 200k... in other words, reporting them in bytes, would be much less impressive
My prediction (Score:4, Interesting)
Like Google they will be spending their power savings $$ advertising on Craigslist's Portland job ads page [craigslist.org]. The Dalle's is not exactly flush with computer savvy talent.
These guys again (Score:2)
datacentreknowledge.com is a goddamn scam. They always manage to make front page at Slashdot by regurgitating somebody's press release. Their summaries are incomplete and poorly summarised. Most of their articles link to other shitty articles in order to boost advertising revenue.
They add. No. Value. Whatsoever. Please stop linking to them, Slashdot.
To Oregon? (Score:5, Funny)
Amazon's Cloud Data Center to Follow Google to Oregon
Amazon has died of dysentery.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Google is absurd about this (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I can't see any reason that they would care about images of their places. And if they really DID care, for some freakish reason, they're doing a poor job of keeping their secrets secret. I just don't see the conspiracy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Amazon has died of dysentery.
No, it was some mystery virus they picked up in the jungle.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's true about Google's secret lair.
Growing up in Oregon, there were often strange disappearances around The Dalles. Local folk stories talked about vans of mysterious Google workers kidnapping transients and performing experiments on them for upcoming products.
Yes, I've been hearing about the new Google Implant. I don't think I'll be an early adopter on this one though.
Re:That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean" (Score:4, Interesting)
No, I'm not kidding.
Parent
Re:That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean" (Score:4, Interesting)
A dam-installed hydro turbine is a slow thing, not a blender or a jet engine.
Turbine-passage survival is a complicated function of gap sizes, runner blade angles, wicket gate openings and overhang, and water passageway flow patterns.
The very latest set of retrofits at the Columbia and Snake dams had a goal of 98% survivability for turbine-passing fish, and higher for flume-passing fish. These retrofits are not only better for the fish, but produce more power.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)