Credit Crunch Squeezing Data Center Space 84
miller60 writes "Many companies have saved money by leasing wholesale 'plug and play' data center space instead of building their own facilities. But the credit crunch has slowed the construction of new data centers, and analysts say this will create a shortage of data center space in 2010 in key markets like northern Virginia and Silicon Valley where demand exceeds supply. The situation is already becoming critical for companies with large space requirements, as indicated by a flurry of leasing recently in northern Virginia, where the remaining space may be quickly absorbed by government stimulus projects."
Re:Our own data center (Score:3, Informative)
It probably is the power supply [crn.com]. In the UK, the cost of electricity went up dramatically a year or so ago. Now, space is practically free, bandwidth too, but 20A costs more than your firstborn.
We put some new servers in our machine room at work, nice 4U 6x4core CPUs, with 32Gb RAM, and 8 SAS drives in each chassis. Come to think of it, I can't think why everyone suddenly has a problem with insufficient supply of power to datacentres.... :)
Gerr... what?? (Score:4, Informative)
India has a pretty firm grasp on data centers now, India's economy is doing ok at the moment.. so net effect? No data center shortages.
Total capacity is if we actually used all of our available space instead of dedicating some of it to on-site tape storage, admin cubicles, increased our eletrical capacity to max, and same with AC. You won't see a data center shortage, you will however see an upsurge in datacenter remodeling.
It's called virtualization... (Score:4, Informative)
We tripled the number of servers and halved the space requirements by virtualizing as much as we could. The only things we couldn't put in a VM were stuff with specific HW requirements (like fax server boards and tape robots). Many large companies are just afraid or unaware of the capabilities of virtualization. The big software companies also aren't helping. For example, Oracle needs to get over it and figure out that many midsize companies don't need RAC for performance or 24/7 @ 99.999% - there are many, many businesses that really can tolerate an app being down for under an hour (or less) while the VM is brought up on a different physical box. The current Oracle license model completely fails in an environment where you want to run mulitple VMs on relatively cheap multicore, multiprocessor blades.
Re:sounds like bullcrap to me (Score:4, Informative)
Small to medium sized datacenters are in the 100s of racks range. They measure power capacity in megawatts (MVA).
Typically, though, your real constraint is the cooling system. For this reasons the datacenter most of my clients are in gives you a certain amount of floor space for a certain amount of power when you buy a cage. The power works out such that you couldn't really fill a whole 42U with 1U servers, let alone blades.