Amazon's Cloud Data Center To Follow Google To Oregon

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."

I feel a slight sense of jealousy

.. my files are getting to see parts of the world I've never even been to, via Jungledisk. Anyway, as an S3 customer, the more data centres they have, the better.

On an Ecological level I hope electricity in Oregon is mainly nuclear, wind or Hydro....

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IIRC, its hydro. Cheap "green" electricity why its becoming prime data center territory.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

What I don't get is if it is power they want,why they don't come to AR. We got Nuclear power(so it's cheap) and we have a TON of abandoned Titan 2 missile silos that would be kick ass for data centers. They are deep enough underground that the cooling bills would be a whole lot cheaper,they would probably get a huge break on their insurance because nobody is going to get through those blast doors without permission,and they have been selling the things so cheap that some folks are actually turning them into houses. Plus I'm sure they have plenty of power and communication lines already run to hook them into the defense grid,and here in AR they are happy to give out huge tax breaks for anyone willing to bring their business here. It seems to me like it would be an easy way to save money on a data center.

Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy

.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.

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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.

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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

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mainly hydro, some natural gas - http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/oregon.pdf [doe.gov]

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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.

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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

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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

Huh?

All your online data doesn't really live in a big, fluffy cloud.

What? Now he tells me.

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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...

These places are designed to be risk-averse

If I had a mobile home, or if I lived on a boat, I would be really tempted just to follow the data centers and live wherever there's a major one. Seems like the Columbia river would be nice to have next door for the power-generation potential, also. Especially coming from someplace like California, where we have blackouts all the time. If the economy *is* going down the tubes, then now may be just the time to pick a strategic home base.

Real estate

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.

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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

Can someone explain what an "object" is?

My prediction

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.

To Oregon?

Amazon's Cloud Data Center to Follow Google to Oregon

Amazon has died of dysentery.

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Uh, I can see the buildings just fine in google maps (maps.google.com, not that maps.google.ca address you gave.

Re:Google is absurd about this

If by "stupidly secretive" you mean "thrifty and not buying all the latest aerial imagery all the time"...

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Maps areial views around here are about 10 years old, Street View is clearly newer than that where it exists. Is it censorship or just outdated images taken before the building was built?

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Amazon has died of dysentery.

No, it was some mystery virus they picked up in the jungle.

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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"

You know what they call what happens to a salmon that goes through a hydro dam? Turbine induced stress.

No, I'm not kidding.

Re:That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean"

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.