The Soaring Costs for New Data Center Projects

miller60 writes "The cost of building a quality data center is rising fast. Equinix will spend $165 million to convert a Chicago warehouse into a data center, while Microsoft is said to be shopping Texas sites for a massive server farm that could cost as much as $600 million. Just three years ago, data centers were dirt cheap due to a glut of facilities built by failed dot-coms and telcos like Exodus, AboveNet and WorldCom. Those sites have been bought up amid surging demand for data storage, so companies needing data center space must either build from scratch or convert existing industrial sites. Microsoft and Yahoo are each building centers in central Washington, where cheap hydro electric power from nearby dams helps them save on energy costs, which can be enormous for high-density server installations."

Detroit?

[haydenth (588730)]

Some of these firms should really start looking at warehouses in Detroit. If you can secure the facility properly, you can get TONS of old warehouses and factory floors for very little. Look at the conversion that Wayne State did with techtown [techtownwsu.org] - they converted an old abandoned warehouse into usable high-tech space (and the real estate was virtually free).

Re:Detroit?

[vertinox (846076)]

Some of these firms should really start looking at warehouses in Detroit.

Do bullet proof vests come included?

Re:Detroit?

[Bishop (4500)]

Power grid reliability is not a big concern. Data centres of this size will have backup generators. Taxes aren't going to be an issue either. These data centres will be given sweatheart tax deals, no interest loans, and other incentives. The states and counties will give out these incentives because the data centres will bring so called "high tech jobs."

Seems to me they should target Rust Belt/non-metro

[patio11 (857072)]

In the finest of Slashdot traditions I'm speaking from barely informed ignorance here:

It seems to me you can control your costs by buying existing space, like a mothballed factory, in an economically depressed area. Like, say, anywhere in the rust belt. You've got a bit of flexibility in siting as long as you can get Internet pipes, and you don't necessarily *have* to set up in an area known for a workforce with a high degree of tech skill (and absurd prevailing wages along with almost certainly having higher cost of everything because its metropolitan).

Our technology incubator in Japan is in a park with a few major data centers and is located 40 miles from the middle of nowhere. The US analog would be siting the datacenter in a cornfield in central Illinois. We have (comparitively) cheap power rates, a cost of living (and prevailing salaries) a fraction of that in Nagoya, and the rent (heavily subsidized by local government, which may not be an option for folks discussed in these articles) is a song.

Re:Seems to me they should target Rust Belt/non-me

[0racle (667029)]

The cost of turning that into a safe datacenter environment would be enormous. When was the last time you heard of a abandoned factory being built to hold a temperature controlled environment? The costs that go into making a real datacenter are significant, and building the place from scratch for that purpose can be cheaper. Building a datacenter right downtown is a stupid idea, but that doesn't make building it out in the boonies a good one.

Re:Seems to me they should target Rust Belt/non-me

[Lumpy (12016)]

The cost of turning that into a safe datacenter environment would be enormous. When was the last time you heard of a abandoned factory being built to hold a temperature controlled environment?

oh for crying out loud. It amazes me the lack of thought outside the box people have.

Options...

1 - spend very little and build seperate enclosures inside the wearhouse that hold the libert units for environment control and the servers in data-center pods.

2 - go uber cheap. Buy a bunch of camper trailers that are gutted and put the servers inside those parked in the wearhouse. works great and I have seen several startups that did exactly that. this also works very well for rental property as you can pull up stakes and move your datacenter within minutes of getting your data pipes into another cheap wearhouse.

the best option and the one usually does in these types of datacenters is the first. you can hire simple general contractors to build interior walls with roofs that are only 10 feet high and insulate the crap out of them to make the perfect datacenter within 5 - 30 days.

It's the mentially retarted CEO's and Venture Capilolists that think you need to spend 80 million dollars on a flashy facility with lots of glass and artwork and special "touches" that only impress clients that will never go there or see it.

Re:Seems to me they should target Rust Belt/non-me

[Pollardito (781263)]

I wonder if anyone has run feasibility studies on building datacenters in abandoned underground facilities?

enough already with the elaborate plans to turn your room in your parents' basement into a fortune 500 company!

Re:Seems to me they should target Rust Belt/non-me

[Fulcrum of Evil (560260)]

They're naturally temperature-controlled: anything more than a few feet down is going to hover around 40-50F

Yeah, sure, until you saturate the heat capacity of the ground around you. Mind, the ground conducts slowly, and datacenters have a lot higher power density than your basement.

Re:Seems to me they should target Rust Belt/non-me

[EzRider (598401)]

Actually your not that far off the mark. Building a data center basically comes down to five key components:

1. Getting lots of cheap power. Being next to a power plant with tons of extra capacity doesn't hurt. The farther you are, the more loss, and that means more $$$ per MW.
2. Internet pipes. Having X thousand servers up and running with nowhere to push the bits is pretty useless. I'm not sure if most people understand how hard it is to say get 40-60 Gig of bandwidth to the middle of nowhere. It tak

Re:Seems to me they should target Rust Belt/non-me

[dj245 (732906)]

Other posts have dealt with what you might need to get a datacenter running in one of these places. A good analogy, I think, is if you were to go and build a power station. A power station needs the following things-

1. Access to a large body of water cuts costs immensely when dumping the heat from the beast. Fresh is preferred but not required.
2. Access to high voltage lines, or a short distance to one that can be tied into. 34.5 and 105kV lines are expensive to build and maintain on a long-term basis.
3. Access to fuel. Ideally rail, ship, or pipeline, because power plants burn massive quantities of fuel. Trucks do not cut it unless the distance is extremely short.

I recently worked at a power station that was originally built with none of these things. The only people to ever make any money from this white elefant were the contracters that built it.

Build your datacenter near a large body of water (or maybe in Juneau?). Build it near a power station (or build your own steam plant?). Build near some big strands of fiber. Being in the middle of nowhere for the sake of being in the middle of nowhere only profits the contractors.

Re:Seems to me they should target Rust Belt/non-me

[patio11 (857072)]

Like I said: I live in Japan. We're the earthquake capital of the world, and yet somehow we manage to have buildings stay standing. Many of them also contain computers or millions of dollars of capital, strange as this may be. I trust that the folks living in Iowa and Detroit have figured out some combination of construction techniques, building codes, and insurance schemes which enables their cities to be something other than windswept wastelands. I mean, how long has the auto industry put billion-dollar factories in Detroit? And how many times have you seen GM say "Aww shootskie, we forgot about the ice storms and now three production lines are buried under 400 tons of collapsed roof and snow?"

Re:Build it somewhere cold

[Nutria (679911)]

Why not build your datacenter in alaska where it's colder year round.

Our datacenter in just up the Hudson from NYC and was built back in the 1960s, When IBM Ruled The Datacenter, and disk farms generated a lot of heat and the ambient temperature needed to be roughly 70F.

So, the DC is in the 2nd basement, and (had) vents to the outside, so cold winter air could be shunted into the room.

Became obsolete, though, in the mid 1990s when the huge 3390 farm was replaced by a couple of EMC cabinets and the bipolar m

esp banks...

[eggoeater (704775)]

I work for a large financial institution.
We have a LOT of data...and not just account data.
Back in the 80's, the standard was two mainframes in the same room, back-up
tapes kept on and off site, and a contract with a company to supply a DR computer
if it was ever needed.

Cut to 2006...
We have dual fully redundant data centers, each with many mainframes, and pipes
big enough to drive a dump truck full of bits between the two.
A third one is about to open and a fourth is under construction.

Most of this is for SOX.

Re:esp banks...

[tepples (727027)]

SOX is shorthand for Sarbanes-Oxley Act [wikipedia.org].

In QUINCY?

[DurendalMac (736637)]

I grew up in Moses Lake, WA, which is about 30 miles SE of Quincy. This should be going into Moses Lake, but it isn't. We have goddamn fiber optics laid all over that town (and the county, exempting Quincy due to some sort of contract the PUD had with Verizon, I believe) going right up to people's houses. I enjoyed a 100Mbps symmetric connection for a while...then my bandwidth got capped. In fact, the PUD is charging the service providers so damn much for bandwidth, some have to cap it at 1Mbps down/512Kbps up. That's slower than fucking DSL and Cable! The local PUD is sitting on a fucking GOLDMINE and they're not doing a goddamned thing about it! They could have easily wooed MS and Yahoo into Moses Lake to build their datafarms there using the PUD's fiber network through the local providers (the PUD can't sell service, so they sell the use of the network to ISPs) and made things better in the town. But they're not doing shit. They haven't been doing much to promote, pitch, or package it for big guys to come in and build a major server farm out here. It pisses me off to no end to see those fuckers doing so little to help that town, and it needs all the help it can get. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

I don't buy it

[appleLaserWriter (91994)]

The Westin Building [officespace.com] (no not THAT office space) still has plenty of space, including the entire 5th floor!

Re:I don't buy it

[1sockchuck (826398)]

Most enterprise customers don't have any interest in sharing a facility with 50 other telecom providers and hosting companies in a carrier hotel like The Westin Building. These companies want big, stand-alone data centers where they can have complete control over access and security. The other issue is that space is limited in telecom hotels like Westin. The Equinix project mentioned in TFA is 225,000 square feet, and the Microsoft requirement is for more than 400,000 square feet. Westin is a large facility

Humble Suggestion.

[pavon (30274)]

As we know worker moral is important, and considering the traditional living arrangements of your standard computer geek, it stands to reason that they should build their data center in the most awesome basement [triggur.org] ever built! Hey, one can dream can't he? To the batcave!

Costs haven't changed that dramatically

[aaarrrgggh (9205)]

It's incredibly uninformed to talk of costs in terms of total dollars!

The old metric was in $/sq. ft., and today it is better to talk in terms of $/kW given higher densities.

For a wide range of data centers, the building shell cost is around $100-250/sq. ft. An enterprise (EIA 692 "Tier 4") data center costs about $22k/kW, plus the high end of the building shell cost. A "Tier 3" data center is closer to $20k/kW and $200/sq. ft. When you drop to Tier 2, you cut the cost in about half, at $12k/kW.

The only costs that have risen dramatically recently are generators and copper, which have a one-year lead time for big engines typically used (1.5-2+ MW) for the generetor, and about triple the cost three years ago for copper-- maybe a 15% premium maximum for a large data center.

Costs get much more complicated when you talk about provisions for future expansion and site constraints.

As for energy costs, yes, cheaper electricity is good for a data center. A 2MW data center will save about $350k/year if they can drop their electricity cost by $0.01 per kWh!

Re:Costs haven't changed that dramatically

[WilsonSD (159419)]

The otherr realy key metric is server utilization. It turns out the IT's dirty little secret is that the way they deploy applications (in static silos of servers that can't be shared between applications) requires that each app be dramatically over provisioned with hardware to handle various load changes. A typical data center is only using 10% of it's compute capacity at any given time. This has gotten dramatically worse as people moved from Mainframe->SMP->Cheap Pizza Boxes.

-Steve

http://www.cassatt.com/ [cassatt.com]

Time to Build Datacenters

[bazily (838434)]

I love this cycle, where internet business heats up and companies start building datacenters to keep up with perceived demand. It happened the last time around, with companies like Exodus, Cable & Wireless, and all the others who were overbuilt when demand didn't materialize.

Anything over 50k sf of datacenter is more than enough, assuming you've got cheap and available power, and close to a couple fiber loops. The big reason that these new datacenters are so large (200k-400k sf, compared that to 1 floor of a high rise office at 30k sf) is because they aren't allowed to have the power density (elec co can only supply so much at reasonable price). With servers more power hungry, yet smaller, there's a need for more power/cooling, but less space.

Building new isn't all that different in cost of retrofitting an old warehouse. I'd just buy one of the small operators out there and be up and running for a % of the cost. The problem there is that there's a company called Digital Realty Trust buying all a lot of the datacenters in the market, and they've got a ton of cash.

So maybe the rust belt should be fighting for these developments, but they can't overcome 1 issue - companies want to be close to their datacenter. It goes against the security mission, the cost justification, and just about everything else; but these always get built right next to corporate HQ or in some metropolitan area. Doh!

building out datacentres cost soaring

[Exter-C (310390)]

The cost of building out datacentres has been soaring for several reasons, the first real issue is being able to provide enough power for todays power hungry servers to run at any sort of density required to actually churn the data. We see datacentres only able to offer very low amount of power per square meter in the UK, which is very low and can often only provide you with upto 4 quad processor XEON servers per rack. When you can only have that density the cost is much greater. The other aspect is how do you cool it, the traditional airconditioning raised floor method really does not work as its almost impossible to actually cool where you have to cool and there will always be hot spots even if your doing warm row cold row designs etc. Its important to seal the cool air in and funnel it to where its needed. APC have recently been working heavily in this area and claim to be able to cool MASSIVE amounts of density. The other issue is the management aspects of these datacentres. In the past you could design a datacentre to be good for 5-10 years now its hard to design something which will be good for the same length of time becaues the power requirements, cooling and power grid is something that is often over utilised (as per in the UK datacentre market).

The price of AJAX

[Animats (122034)]

This is the price of AJAX. If users are constantly going back to the server in the middle of a page, you need more server capacity. Really, the AJAX approach is a hideously inefficient way to update a form. We're now seeing the price of that.

Re:The price of AJAX

[lachlan76 (770870)]

Umm, AJAX is *more* efficient than a static page. It needs less server capacity because it doesn't require the entire form to be reloaded constantly.

Re:I don't buy it.

[ceejayoz (567949)]

Microsoft is willing to spend years and years waiting for the Xbox to become properly profitable, so it wouldn't be particularly surprising.