Post 4 – The Changing Technology
Moore’s law still applies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law ), so capability, capacity, and infrastructure requirements continue to grow at a very fast pace. I just want to give two examples of change here – the equipment and the alternatives to data center facilities.
Large companies in this business that own their own facilities plan on obsolescence in three to five years, before selling it off to other companies ready to “grow into” their hand-me-down facilities. Is this a market that you, with your backgrounds as long-time Page County residents, can see us competing in – and succeeding in?
The racks and servers themselves populating data centers can also be obsolete in two to five years and their owners will have to replace them. However, this process can also mean an update to the facility at the same time the new equipment is brought in. If our data center were fully populated with 500 or so racks, when the recap cycle begins we’d need to recap those at a rate of one every other day. That is a lot of equipment to ship in and out of Page County – we can handle the truck traffic, but our roads would need to be improved to handle shipping sensitive, expensive equipment in and out of here.
Major technology vendors have even come up with a technology that lets users avoid the cost of a data center facility altogether: companies like Sun, HP, Microsoft, Google, etc., are advertising new modular systems that use sea freight containers and can be installed anywhere – they don’t even need a facility to house them anymore. These boxes, costing from $500,000 to $1.5 million each (an example is at http://nebula.nasa.gov/about/ - the data center is in the white container next to the antenna) are designed to allow users to avoid hard facility costs, like the $16.5 million Page County construction budget.
By the way, people cannot work in these containers. They are simply built with enough redundancy that no service is required…and they are replaced when they wear out.
Next Post – Summing Up
1 comment:
Reposting my caveat on these posts:
I understand that the EDA's role is courting and attracting business to Page County. However, a lot of people are appearing in the PNC making statements about the data center - very few of them associated with PTS, the company who announced they wanted to build it in the first place. The letters I am referrring to are the recent ones by Dave McClure and Bill Shuler, where it's understood they have roles within the County (McClure calls himself the CTO, Shuler is vice chair of the EDA and BBA), yet here they are championing a data center...it gets very confusing to me about whether this is a public sector effort or private sector initiative - it belongs firmly in the private sector...with Mr. Tong and PTS, who are best qualified to decide for themselves on these risks.
Since so many of these people making public statements aren't being clear on their roles, I have left a lot of these details in a not specific state.
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