Re: Data Center Facility Costs

On Fri, Mar 07, 2008, Higham, Josh wrote:
>> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kevin Kargel
>> 
>> That's one reason I am rather surprised that some server farm hasn't
>> moved in here.  There is good power available, cheap real estate,
>> existing empty structures, a friendly economic development committee,
>> easy bandwidth close to the backbone, a modern school and brand new
>> hospital.  We may not have stop lights (a traffic jam is three cars at
>> the same intersection) but we do have a grocery store, hardware store
>> and movie theatre. We even have a very nice coffee shop and a 
>> hotel.  I
>> work at the telco/ISP and we are a co-op, which lets us be less
>> structured than the big boys and do more custom installations for our
>> customers.  
>
>Last NANOG there was a quick presentation about datacenter locations,
>and according to that both Google and Yahoo(?) have datacenters in the
>central Washington area primarily for the cheap power.  The sentiment
>presented at that meeting was that power is the number one issue in the
>future.  Is anyone in the datacenter business playing power futures
>(similar to airlines which operate on the fuel futures market)?
>
>Connectivity can (eventually) be brought anywhere with little recurring
>cost, but power has the most uncertainty.  The problem is chicken and
>egg, since connectivity won't be brought in until there is a reason, and
>no one wants to build a datacenter without the connectivity.

There have been issues with connectivity to Eastern Washington (e.g. Walla
Walla and Spokane) in which links have been taken out in mud slides and
similar events.  There was a major power outage in Walla Walla this winter
which took out service for an extended period of time.

I can't speak to the reliability of fiber connections throughout that area,
but I have seen a fair number of problems with DSL connections.  Hopefully
things are better than they were when I was doing a job in Moses Lake in
the mid-90s and couldn't get a reliable modem connection back to Seattle
faster than 2,400 baud, and I had to fiddle the modem settings to get it to
connect at all.

Bill
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