October 15, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Moving to the Heartland
October 16, 2008 at 1:23 am
It might be a bit of a commute from Leeds, UK but working in a data center in a beautiful setting sounds perfect!
October 16, 2008 at 1:27 am
You're talking about being near enough to attend home games for the Broncos. Hmmm, I grew up loving the Broncos (though I have no connection to Denver). 🙂
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
October 16, 2008 at 3:43 am
Personally, I'd love to get out the UK... however, I'm not too sure the US is much better 🙂
DBA (Dogsbody with Bad Attitude)
October 16, 2008 at 4:42 am
Nice topic! The data center boom is very interesting and exciting.
It is great for the small towns and remote locations.
BTW: Nice shirt in the video version of this editorial!! 😀
October 16, 2008 at 4:47 am
Hmmm....
Seems to me as if this change in emphasis is just a stepping stone to a different architecture altogether. Anyone else see the irony in decentralising data centres? Personally, I suspect that, as soon as everyone's comfortable with data centres being largely geography independent, they'll quickly move on to stopping bothering with data centres at all, though I'm not sure how that'll translate in practical implementations.
That said, cleverer people than me have been embarrassingly wrong in their predictions of the future, so I may well be way off the mark - albeit less embarrassed to be so.
Semper in excretia, suus solum profundum variat
October 16, 2008 at 5:57 am
I lived in Denver for five years - from late 97 to early 03 - and am planning to move back within the next couple of years. We didn't spend much time east of Denver, but if you build your data center in Summit, Grand or Eagle, I'll start packing tonight. 🙂
October 16, 2008 at 6:08 am
Not sure you want to be counting on diesel fuel getting to Summit, Grand, or Eagle if the power goes out 😉
I'm not sure we want to decentralize data centers too much, heck, I still see plenty of people struggling with local clusters, much less geographical ones. That being said, VMWare is working hard on vMotion working across data centers, assuming you have the bandwidth.
The idea of putting data centers, or a tech business in smaller community makes some sense to me. Lower costs, and you might attract a lot of people that want to live in a different place. Chances are you need a decent population in the first place, maybe even a relatively high tech one. I could see somewhere like Golden building data centers, it's close to the mountains, but not in them, perhaps cheaper to live in than other places.
There have been a quite a few software companies growing near universities. It would be great to see some of those smaller schools benefit from a trend like this.
October 16, 2008 at 6:19 am
When I moved from Philadelphia to the New York metropolitan area a few years ago, the thing that stood out to me the most was the cost of property. A home in NY is often more than double the price of a similar home in other parts of the country (even thought salaries are no where near doubled). This, along with traffic congestion and crowds is the result of one lone factor - population density. Population density gets high when you get millions of people who think that they have to all live in the same place to work and conduct business. That may have been true 50 years ago, but now there just isn't any reason for it.
Recently, we learned that high gas prices force people to consider alternate fuels. The first barrier was apparently $4.00 a gallon. I wonder when the cost of real estate and the general cost of living will get to the point where business people realize that building their data center in Iowa is much more cost effective than other locations (even when you factor in building infrastructure)? Frankly, I don't know how any company built in the costly areas of coastal California or metropolitan New York can compete with companies built in cheaper areas any more...
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“Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason.”
October 16, 2008 at 6:43 am
Someguy (10/16/2008)
...Recently, we learned that high gas prices force people to consider alternate fuels. The first barrier was apparently $4.00 a gallon. I wonder when the cost of real estate and the general cost of living will get to the point where business people realize that building their data center in Iowa is much more cost effective than other locations ..
At the same time, the fuel cost is pushing towards cities with lots of workers within a short distance and readily available mass transit.
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-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
October 16, 2008 at 6:44 am
I think the only hesitation for some to relocate to work in a remote opportunity is the lack of a 'Plan B' if the company folds. Finding yourself owning a new home, the kids enrolled in school and you out of a job in Fondis, CO might be a career changing event.
October 16, 2008 at 6:59 am
Fuel can cost more in cities, plus you can easily burn more fuel in cities trying to commute from your house. Don't forget most people don't necessarily live near work.
Finding other jobs is a problem, which is why it's good to see MS, Google, etc. investing in these smaller towns. They provide more jobs, so maybe you lose your job and they have one, or they let someone go and there's a job at your company.
October 16, 2008 at 7:42 am
Part of the long term problem I see with this is the offerings made by states and localities. The Midwest is famous for tax abatements. In my city we pay a 1% sales tax on restaurant food to pay for the Memorial Coliseum expansion (hockey, concerts, conventions, etc). Yeah, getting the outside business is good, but once government gets its hands on a revenue stream, it never goes away. Those bonds were paid years ago. We still pay the tax.
GM was given a huge property tax abatement to build here. Now that the state recognizes that the property taxes are unbearable by the average property owner and has lowered them, many areas can no longer finance schools. The hundreds of millions in tax revenue GIVEN to GM would certainly have made up the difference, at least tenfold.
Another reason for those data center locations is cheap, plentiful power, certainly compared to the West Coast. And what happens to those two things as more data centers move? No longer cheap, no longer plentiful. Just look at the corn to ethanol debacle as an example.
Like everything else, it is a double-edged sword. Data centers should not require a large concentration of workers nearby, which makes remote locations ideal. But be careful how your location lures these businesses, who employ few and spend most of their local money with the utilities.
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Buy the ticket, take the ride. -- Hunter S. Thompson
October 16, 2008 at 8:08 am
I always had it in my mind the main reason companies move data centers to "remote" locations is for disaster recovery, and that job creation, tax incentives, etc... are just supporting motivations. I wonder if any research has been done to prove that this movement has accelerated since 9/11?
October 16, 2008 at 8:37 am
One thing that helps to drive this is the amount of support staff that can be available remotely. I work in a company with a large on-site data center, but I haven’t actually been in the data center for several years, even though it is located less then 50 feet from where I sit. There are people that have to be able to go into the data center to physically manipulate hardware, but a large part of the support comes from people that don’t really need to be anywhere near the data center. We have other large data centers that I help support, and I haven’t even visited those sites.
The smaller that size of the staff that has to be physically present, the easier it is to locate in a remote area with a relatively small population, provided it has the power and communications infrastructure. There is probably no reason why a data center with several thousand servers couldn’t be handled by 50 people or less on-site, and the rest of the workers connecting remotely.
The down side of this for a small town is that they may provide fewer jobs than a large call center that has seats for 1,000 representatives, and can provide employment for less skilled people. That data center in Iowa may create a lot of jobs, but it could be for people living in New York, Toronto, San Diego, Manila, or Mumbai.
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