Data Centers Coming To a City Near You (datacenterfrontier.com) 39
1sockchuck writes: There are more wired businesses than ever in towns and cities across America. That's why the data center industry is coming to smaller cities you may not think of as technology hubs. Industry executives say the convergence of cloud computing, Big Data and the Internet of Things will require data centers in many places outside the traditional "Big Six" markets (Northern Virginia, New York/New Jersey, Chicago, Dallas, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles). "We're seeing success in the Tier 2 markets," said Kevin Bostick of 365 Data Centers, which operates in markets like Buffalo, Nashville and Pittsburgh. "We feel very confident with our ability to grow in these markets, especially given what we've seen over the past six months." Commercial real estate brokers confirm the trend, citing strong interest in the Pacific Northwest (especially Portland).
PNW (Score:4, Interesting)
The Pacific Northwest seems like a reasonably good choice for data centers, at least for serving this corner of the country. Lots of clean, cheap hydro power, near major tech industry in Seattle area, and there's plenty of water for cooling.
Re:PNW (Score:4, Funny)
The Pacific Northwest seems like a reasonably good choice for data centers, at least for serving this corner of the country.
That's like saying my kitchen seems like a reasonably good location for a sandwich shop, at least for serving my house.
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Lots of clean, cheap hydro power,
Not any more. They're tearing down the dams.
and there's plenty of water for cooling.
Won't somebody please think of the fish?
Re:PNW (Score:4, Insightful)
No one is going to be breaching the Grand Coulee Dam or the several dozen other major dams in the near future. I wouldn't extrapolate a few small, obsolete dams being torn down into some sort of trend.
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Hydro power is anything but clean and cheap, if you look at the actual environmental effects of building the stuff and preventing the floods that many of those dams were built to prevent.
Somebody else mentioned the risk of serious earthquakes - that doesn't mean you shouldn't put a data center there, both for low operating costs and proximity to part of your customer base, but you need to look at having backup capacity in other geographical areas. (Which you need to anyway, since that data center in Oklaho
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http://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/pacnw/rescasp1.html [usgs.gov]
This particular gif is an attention grabber:
http://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/pacnw/graphic/a2.gif [usgs.gov]
The Pacific Northwest is one of those spots on earth where a lot of tectonic action (both thrust and subduction) mix with volcanic instability to churn the crust of the planet:
http://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/pacnw/map.html [usgs.gov]
I know every area has it's own hazards (http://earthquake.usgs.go [usgs.gov]
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Well, it's a good thing Silicon Valley is safely situated far away from dangerous faultlines, right? ;-)
I've lived in or near the Seattle area all my life, and I'd say I've noticed a minor earthquake perhaps once every five years or so on average. I've never experienced even a moderately sized quake during my entire lifetime. I'm sure it looks rather dangerous when you're viewing a large regional map with all the quakes from the last century or two overlaid. In reality, I'd bet the odds of a major quake
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The Pacific Northwest seems like a reasonably good choice for data centers, at least for serving this corner of the country. Lots of clean, cheap hydro power, near major tech industry in Seattle area, and there's plenty of water for cooling.
Quebec Canada is an excellent choice for a data centre and for the following reasons:
Continuous and very very low cost electric supply (I bet it can be around 4 cents per KWH) from James Bay.
As Winters are cold, the buildings can be heated from the heat given off by the equipment
Summers are not extra-ordinarily hot -- The site would not need massive Air Conditioning.
Employee skills are on a par or above many other localities. (virtually Free University and well educated graduates)
Multi-lingualism -- great p
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No they aren't.
Datacenters ? What for ? (Score:3, Funny)
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I just wait for someone to start selling "your new, own personal cloud to put in your home!!" devices.
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I just wait for someone to start selling "your new, own personal cloud to put in your home!!" devices.
Like this? [wdc.com]
Or this? [seagate.com]
Or maybe this? [lacie.com]
Will there ever be self-storage type datacenters? (Score:2)
Will there ever be small-scale, self-storage type data centers?
Most of the data centers I've been in are large and elaborate affairs, with extensive security systems, a dozen or more (that I could see) on site staff, and all the requisite complexity of systems that allows them to house 10s of thousands of square feet of racks.
This scale and complexity comes at a price, though, which often seems to price out SMBs looking for just an incrementally more reliable place to house offsite systems than the overload
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There are tons of DC's that have maybe a couple guys on days and an on call. L3 and the likes has no manged services DC's. You can easily get a rack with 20a 110v for under a grand a month (a decent hunk of that price is power/cooling). Lots of places offer half and quarter racks. A quarter rack is about as small as you can go where there is customer access since it's about as small as you can make it. Piles of places will let you ship a 1ru where they and stack it for you for a very nominal fee.
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The problem was this is expensive. In particular you generally have one or more very expensive persons who main duty it is t
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But, for backups, development VMs, docker playground, VMs, etc, etc, I keep a near-consumer-grade (i.e., no redundant power supply) 4U box, stuffed with consumer-grade SATA 2TB drives (in RAID 6), in one of those cheapy DCs for under $50 a month. Gives me a lot of functionality that would cost a crap-ton more than $50 a month to replicate with AWS or DigitalOcean.
That's exactly the kind of cost point I'm thinking of -- I think that works out to about $500/rack, $250/half rack. At those kinds of prices, many of the SMBs I work with would be pretty eager to colocate equipment for backup, DR or HA purposes.
There's just a whole universe of SMBs with infrastructure running on premises for whom the costs, limitations or functionality of public cloud or high-end colocation is just not workable and for whom facility limitations make ISP redundancy, generators, etc unobtain
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In my city (Ottawa), we have a few such datacenters. They'll have one guy working the sign-in desk in the daytime, and I think they're on call after-hours. They have biometric access doors, so anyone with a private rack or cage can come and go as they please. I never counted, but I'd estimate maybe 250 racks or so. It's pretty small. Now, they are not exactly cheap, but we Canadians love to get financially sodomized by our ISPs, or so I've been led to believe.
Small Distributed Datacenters as home heaters (Score:2)
(I read about this on the net, so almost all of the details may be wrong.) There's some company in Norway or somewhere that has a business model of putting small datacenter units into people's homes, with a narrow rack of computers and storage, using them as electric heaters, which reduces their HVAC and real estate costs and takes advantage of fiber infrastructure.
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The problem with a self-storage type arrangement is the difficulty in securing them. For example, cutting through the sheet metal wall between units is simple, and there's no one there to (a) notice, or (b) try to stop you. Most storage units are filled with moderately useless junk, so no one bothers to break into them. When you have thousands of dollars worth of servers (and priceless data) in there, thieves will take notice.
(This isn't new, either. Unattended DC's have been broken into many times. Rarely
Not me (Score:2)
Data Centers Coming To a City Near You
There are no cities near me. Back to the click-bait headline drawing board.
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I'm thinking that a lot of folks in Europe, will be choosing data centers close to their cities at home. Being that the NSA has unlimited access to all data centers in the US . . . it is not a bad idea.
Look out, here comes the pendulum (again)... (Score:2)
FTFA:
This is being driven by two trends:
Not exactly the same forces that drove the movement from large, centralized mainframes to small, distributed desktop computers, but really, didn't we see this coming all along?
Boston / Cambridge / Rt. 128 Ring (Score:2)
Nothing new... (Score:2)
Las Vegas is not considered a big data-center hub, but Switch has had several large data-centers here, and the previous record-holder for the largest data-center in the world here for a few years...
"Coming"? (Score:3)
Any decent-sized city already has dozens of datacenters. Any large city probably has hundreds. Data centers are kind of like parking lots.