Amazon's Cloud Data Center To Follow Google To Oregon 84
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
On an Ecological level I hope electricity in Oregon is mainly nuclear, wind or Hydro....
Re:Google is absurd about this (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:These places are designed to be risk-averse (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy (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 up all the digital data onto an external hard drive that he gave to his dad for safe keeping.
of course, for businesses with large volumes of data that are constantly updated, cloud storage is probably the best solution. through multitenancy small to medium-sized businesses can enjoy the same level of data protection as large enterprises like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I feel a slight sense of jealousy (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!
You can argue "data security" all you want, but we've had a number of customers sign up when they lost all their data due to data security issues. In one case, their servers were actually stolen! (ie: physically GONE, no backups, geez...) If you choose a competent hosting provider, a hosted application can dramatically improve the security and reliability of access to your data.
Re:That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean" (Score:4, Interesting)
No, I'm not kidding.
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.
Re:That Oregon Columbia electricity is not "clean" (Score:1, Interesting)
We have something called fish ladders,
and a report was just released stating that
a river with dams and fish ladders is equal to a river with no dams on it,
with respect to rate of fish surviving to breeding grounds.