Written by Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge, which provides daily news and analysis about the data center industry.
As computing moves into the cloud, the geography of Internet infrastructure is in flux. Data centers historically have been clustered in major Internet markets, including Silicon Valley, New York, Northern Virginia and Dallas. That map is changing rapidly, as data centers are springing up in central parts of the country — and often in rural areas not previously known as technology hubs.
The price of power and the availability of grid capacity are driving many site location decisions, resulting in huge projects in places such as Council Bluffs, Iowa and Quincy, Wash. Do these out-of-the-way locales represent the future of the data center industry
Yes and no. Data-center site location has become more complex, reflecting a segmentation driven by several classes of end-users:
- Search engines and cloud-computing server farms seek out cheap, clean power — lots of it.
- Corporate data centers are guided by the geography of business continuity and the need to move people and data.
- Web hosts and colocation providers stay close to the customers, usually in major markets.
- Content delivery networks (CDNs) and companies in VoIP and video locate in peering hubs and carrier hotels.
Colo providers and CDNs will continue to focus on the major Internet markets. But search engines and corporate data centers present a huge opportunity for regions that until recently would not have been considered as candidates for data center development. As a result, cities once dismissed as second-tier destinations are now seeing vibrant growth of mission-critical facilities.
The biggest cloud builders, Google and Microsoft, require huge amounts of cheap power and open land. Microsoft initiated the siting trend with its decision to build a 470,000-square-foot data center in Quincy, which offers unusually cheap hydropower from local dams. Google has also pursued a rural strategy, announcing $600-million data-center projects in North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Iowa in 2007.
Enterprise data-center customers also giving greater weight to power pricing, but their decisions are also influenced by disaster recovery strategies and the availability of a skilled IT workforce. This has led many large enterprise companies to consider new markets for data centers, especially since the 9/11 terrorist attacks underscored the need for back-up data centers outside of New York and Washington. A study of data center costs by The Boyd Group has highlighted the affordability of markets such as Sioux Falls, S.D., and Tulsa, Okla.
Among the biggest winners in the battle for enterprise data centers have been Austin and San Antonio. Austin won a $450-million Citigroup data center, and two large HP data centers. In San Antonio, Microsoft’s announcement of a $550-million data center has been followed by new data-center projects by the NSA, Stream Realty, Christus Health Systems and Power Loft.
In all cases we see that energy costs, environmental impact, and social and economic supply affect the location of data centers powering both the enterprise and the cloud. As cloud computing gains mind share and market share, it will continue to remake the geography of Internet infrastructure. The massive scalability requirements of cloud platforms will drive construction of ever-larger data centers, offering a physical symbol that, while the Internet is everywhere, it lives in a data center — perhaps one near you.
