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."
Our own data center (Score:3, Interesting)
We've been fighting to find decent data center space for a good while here in Tampa, FL. Level(3) keeps saying they cannot provide enough power to fully utilize their facilities (we read that as holding onto premium real estate for the high bidders) and other data centers we've looked into are either ludicrously expensive or force us to use their connections to the internet which we, as an ISP, really don't want to do.
Very Large Telco/ISP (Score:2, Interesting)
Old news.
I used to work at a VERY LARGE worldwide Telco/ISP. Most of the data centers (almost 40 Class A and hundreds of lower class) locations were closed to new systems due to power and space constraints. We had to retire a system in order to place a new anything into it and the power utilization had to be less than the previous equipment because networking equipment was using more power than ever before (fibre uses more power than copper).
Then we bought an RBOC that had some space and power available in their data centers - the explosion of new projects trying to get placed into them was unbelievable.
All this was 2-3 years ago.
Re:Supply? Demand? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you meant to say, "so does the increase in the number of servers".
If server sales fall, the number of total server still increases as long as the number of servers being removed does not exceed the number of new servers being racked.
How you want to count virtual servers is up to you.
Re:Supply? Demand? (Score:3, Interesting)
> also something supply/demand models do not account for.
I'm sorry, but thats just wrongheaded.
Supply and Demand does not "account" for anything. Price does.
Lead time, credit availability, competition, quality, speed, permitting issues and, yes, Supply and Demand are ALL accounted for by the final Price. And so is behavior, reluctance to take risk.
It is all encapsulated in the price.
I suggest you have left too much of Econ 101 in the classroom, if you ever attended at all.
Re:Very Large Telco/ISP (Score:3, Interesting)
It ain't the servers, dude! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds fishy to me.
Power demands of rack servers have been falling dramatically for years...
Read the post more closely. It's the networking equipment that is chewing up more power. You have to make up for it by using lower-power(-input) servers.
As someone involved in designing the servers I can attest that they ARE taking more power. (Part of that is that they're doing more stuff than just hot-potatoing packets. Part is that they're putting more bandwidth into each RU (Rack Unit {of height in a rack}). And part is that the currently-deploying generation of networking equipment uses custom chips built in the stage of silicon feature shrinkage where the leakage got so big that it is consuming as much power as the computation - the generation before the foundaries figured out a way around that and started cutting the leakage fraction back down.