Top 5 places to build a new data center
Future data center expansion will be happening in developing markets like China, Brazil and Argentina, but such locations may not meet the requirements of data centers today and the requirements that will be necessary in the future. In fact, these five regions may not be the most obvious places to build a data center, but they might save your company a lot of expense.
Data center requirements have changed over the last 10-15 years. A decade or two ago, the two top criteria to consider when choosing a location were network accessibility and access to skilled talent. Fiber networks that connect data centers to the rest of the world were concentrated around metropolitan areas like New York City and San Francisco, but that is no longer the case. Sure, there will always be distance and latency concerns to consider, but the proliferation of high-speed network infrastructure means it is no longer the driving factor it once was. Additionally, data center talent was also limited to where the data centers were. That still holds true, except data centers have spread considerably and so has the skills base. In addition, remote monitoring and management solutions now make it possible for IT administrators to do most of their data center work remotely.
Today, largely because of remote access capabilities, data centers can be built anywhere in the world and be accessible from anywhere there is an Internet connection. As businesses have become more cost-conscious and more concerned about the environmental impact of technology, their data center location criteria have changed considerably. The top four key factors that need to be considered when choosing a data center’s physical location are:
- Access to power today and in the future. Power consumption is on the rise, and brownouts and blackouts are becoming more common in areas that have poor power infrastructure. Data centers require enormous amounts of power, and failures can cause unexpected downtime.
- Cooling and climate. Everything about a data center generates heat, and cooling the facilities can be expensive and challenging. Data centers built in cooler climates can reduce costs because outside air can be used to chill the data center.
- Proximity to risk. Data centers aren’t indestructible. Building them on fault lines, on flood plains, below sea level, or in the path of air traffic create unnecessary risk for the facility.
- Data security. Privacy concerns and compliance regulations require certain types of data (in particular, customers’ personal data) be stored within the region or nation that it’s collected. National legislation like the USA’s Patriot Act may also put data at risk because of the broad powers it grants governments for seizing corporate data. Political instability also causes concern regarding data security.
With these four criteria in mind, there are five regions that stand out as ideal locations for data centers:
New York State
Data centers have been migrating out of New York City, where real estate costs are high, to other areas of the state, in particular western New York. The state provides tax exemptions for data centers, has a solid power infrastructure, and offers excellent access to various metropolitan areas, including New York City and Toronto.
Ontario, Canada
Forbes recently named Canada the best place in the world to do business. The Province of Ontario (in particular, southern Ontario) in central Canada has one of the strongest infrastructures and the largest international airport in the nation. A strong networking and power infrastructure, low risk for natural disasters, and little government interference in corporate data (there is no Canadian equivalent to the Patriot Act) make Ontario, in particular the Golden Horseshoe around Toronto, an ideal location for new data centers.
Eastern Washington State
On the west coast is eastern Washington, which provides a good power infrastructure, plenty of skilled technology workers, and a tech-friendly environment that has been encouraged by technology vendors like Microsoft (headquartered east of Seattle in Redmond).
Colorado
Although data centers are still found in major American cities, increasingly data centers are being built in the Midwest. Colorado is becoming a data center hot spot. It provides power in abundance, a skilled pool of educated workers, availability of government-approved training programs, and low risk of natural disasters.
The Netherlands
As the only European region in this list, the Netherlands plays an important role in the data center world because of its ease of access to the rest of Europe and its friendly environment. The Netherlands provides a strong, clean power infrastructure. For North Americans, it’s also the only mainland European country where you’ll find that everyone speaks English. The Netherlands’ northern European location also provides excellent climate for natural air cooling.
This list identifies five of the top regions out of many that are proving to be excellent locales for data centers. With advances in equipment that runs effectively in hotter conditions and innovation in cooling and climate control, warmer areas (including in the middle of both New Mexico and Nevada as well as Singapore) are rapidly increasing in popularity.
Jim Latimer is the chief strategy officer for CentriLogic, an outsourced data center services provider that provides cloud computing, hybrid hosting, and managed service solutions in the US Northeast and Canada. Prior to joining CentriLogic, Jim was the founder of Fort Nocs Networks and a member of the founding management team of Cyberplex.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Tom Raftery.
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New York State? That’s true for one project by Yahoo. In reality, a number of data center projects have looked at western New York and either passed or been unable to work out power provisioning. Verizon is only one public example of this. Instead, New York companies are doing what they have always done – look for space in New Jersey. If New York state was a strong option, the business wouldn’t be thriving in New Jersey, despite the premium cost of doing business there.
You haven’t looked at what’s been happening at 375 Pearl, then.
Of course, neither did Verizon have their brain switched on when considering how and where to build a data center. Sabey bought the deed in lieu of foreclosure from M&T bank for $120 million – and it’s solidly in progress to fit it’s new name as Intergate Manhattan.
http://tinyurl.com/7xa75h2
Eidard: I’m fully aware of 375 Pearl, which is Manhattan and not in Western New York State, which is the area being suggested as a data center destination.
Dublin is one of the best places in Europe to build a Data Centre. As evidenced by it being the ONLY AWS location at present, Microsoft spending over 1bn on DCs, Google, Sungard and also the DC providers – Interxion, Telecity…
The reason is good access to power, and a growing clean power supply, great 12 month average temp (no real highs or lows – free cooling the majority of the year), English speaking, closest by flight to the US and a great corporate tax rate.
What about Norway and sweden? Skilled workers, cool climate, easy acces to seawater(for cooling) practically no risk of natural disasters, renewable and relative cheap energy, good infrastructure and so on. I know IBM has an intention agreement with Norway, facebook’s building in Sweden and CERN will probably choos one of them too.
Facebook seems to feel that Sweden fulfills these criteria – not least cooling and energy: http://m.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/27/facebook-green-datacentre-sweden-renewables?cat=environment&type=article
Why not on the list?
I’m just gonna say… you need to research Chattanooga, TN. Gigabit fiber optic ethernet, surrounded by mountains which means we receive ZERO weather period, low crime rate outside the immediate vicinity of downtown (it’s largely suburban, so that’s not hard to do), and the gigabit (1000Mbps) fiber connection is just $350/month. Dirt cheap for a data center. I’m sure EPBFi would be willing to work with a data center to work out something special, and the city is the biggest small city you’ve ever seen. An Amazon warehouse, a Volkswagen plant, and also chemical companies, drug companies, a trucking company are all headquarted in the city; not to mention it’s a very good city overall as far as hiking, biking, and hang gliding go.
You sold me, I am going to do some research on Chattanooga.
Iceland… http://articles.cnn.com/2011-09-27/tech/tech_innovation_zero-emission-data-center_1_renewable-energy-iceland-green-power?_s=PM:TECH
It doesn’t satisfy requirement #3. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge passes right through Iceland.
Eastern Washington might as well be another state compared to everything on the other side of the Columbia River. I’m not convinced it’s as tech-worker-rich as you think.
It’s has very good talent. I have worked at one of the Mircosoft data centers for over 2 years. The actual techs come from the surrounding big cities and some local but not too many. Most that work at the data center live between 30-45 minutes away. Eastern WashIngton is very data center dense. I have seen so much grow in 2 years it’s crazy.
Really? Oregon was not mentioned? Eastern Oregon had Facebook’s first Data center. Google has had one here for a few years now and Apple is considering building one in Oregon too.
Not to mention Amazon already having two data center campuses in Umatilla and Boardman, and RackSpace. Not to mention the three or four that just went in in Hillsboro.
For the most part this is correct. But Admins don’t work at data centers typically and they really don’t do much for the sites. No most work cannot be done remotely that why you have on site services to replace HDDs, cables or whatever. Really it will vary in each site/company but if you work at a data center it’s because you physical presence is required to do your job.
Suprised that Oregon was not listed.
And how about Finland? Google has one datacenter here. Firm soil, coldish climate a.k.a. “western Siberia” :), solid infrastructure and political environment.
Really a skewed list, but then given that the author provides solutions in the “US Northeast and Canada”, I suppose it’s understandable. He rightfully highlights the problems of the Patriot Act, which is an immense corporate concern, but then chooses three out of five US locations.
Any list is going to be skewed since every organization has different priorities. I approached this from the perspective of a large western organization looking to build a corporate data center. Access to USA users would likely be very important and, as such, latency would be a concern and the Patriot Act issues would not have a huge impact.
Also, because it was corporate, factors important to a co-location provider such as reasonable proximity to customer for physical access was not included either. If this was a list of the best regions to build a co-lo facility, there would be some big differences.
Maybe I should look at doing a piece on where to build data centers in order for an organization to provide the best global coverage?
Norway (plentiful hydroelectric power, political stability, and lots of old mountain halls formerly used for defence purposes) certainly should be on the list, and fiber connectivity is everywhere. Everyone speaks English as well. Most of the same goes for Sweden.
Power, Security and Cooling are the requirements therefore
Power; you have to rule out the third world because of power instability. Solar could be a good idea therefore somewhere sunny.
Security; you have to rule out any region with unstable governments and political groups.
Cooling; should be near the sea or large inland lake so you could flush with water for cooling.
I believe these conditions will give the best environment for data centre.
There are a many regions around the world that would be outstanding locations for data centers and that list of regions is growing constantly. The fact that data facility construction projects are being considered in some many geographies underscores the fact that the prioritization of the decision criteria have shifted. High-speed networks no cover most of the populated parts of the globe, DC and computing equipment have evolved and can run effectively with less power, less cooling, and better remote management. The people that do need to have hands-on access to the facilities are more numerous and more experienced than they were even a few years ago.
My list is in now way exclusive. I love that there are so many great arguments for additional locations. My list contains five of the regions that currently satisfy all the requirements very well and provide opportunity, I believe the top five. Most of the areas identified in the comments do satisfy the requirements, true, and would I recommend any of them be considered when building a DC, absolutely. There are also some great regions in Western Canada and the Pacific Rim to put on the list too. Do you think, had an article like this been published in 1998, the comments would have argued this variety of regions?
With ongoing advances in lower-power, run-hot equipment; the proliferation of trained, experienced technicians; the anticipated increases in energy costs; and the massive move to modern data centers that is under-way; who do you think will top the list in five or ten years?
Ops. This is what I mean to write
With regards to the Netherlands, it is an excellent location but access to power is somewhat limited, at least more than this article suggests. Regardless, one not talk about Western Europe without mentioning Luxembourg:
http://www.investinluxembourg.lu/ict
Ops. This is what I mean to write
With regards to the Netherlands, it is an excellent location but access to power is somewhat limited ….
to power is somewhat limited, at least more than this article suggests. Regardless, one not talk about Western Europe without mentioning Luxembourg:
http://www.investinluxembourg.lu/ict
There are some great arguments for building a data center in a region that already has a number of other facilities. The skilled people are likely available, both for design and construction and for operations; there is also a good power infrastructure; and the local governments are accustomed to dealing with the industry.
My concerns arise from the “fish in the pond” thing. How big is your data center and your organization compared to others in the region? There is a solid electricity infrastructure but will you get cost effective access to it now and long-term? Any what about support services? What is the region goes through a big blackout.. are you getting fuel? When?
One of the advantages of the data center world evolving the way it has, is that there are so many more regions to consider when building a facility and some of them might be surprising.
The midwest great lakes area is also a good spot. Natural disasters are limited to ice storms and thunderstorms. Tornadoes only plague the southern part of the lakes. Power is decent, and data connectivity is good, especially near academic campuses (Ann Arbor, Columbus, Madison, Kzoo, Bloomington, etc). With more progress in the convection cooling model, leveraging the cooler temperatures in the winter to help cool the equipment may prove useful. The cost of land is one of the largest inhibitors to this region though.
Under the guise of fighting terrorism, the Patriot Act was adopted WITHOUT public approval or vote just weeks after the events of 9/11. Such an unconstitutional set of laws should be abolished seeing as they violate human rights and due process. A mere 3 criminal charges of terrorism a year attributed to this act, which is mainly used for no-knock raids leading to drug-related arrests without proper cause for search and seizure. The laws are simply a means to spy on our own citizens and to detain and torture dissidents without trial or a right to council. You can read much more about living in this Orwellian society of fear and see my visual response to these measures on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-in-society-of-fear-ten-years.html
Is there an upper limit to the number data centres a single city should host? Because of capacity, security, other?
Well…you can add Orem Utah to that list. We are going to be one of the few FULLY fiber optic cities in the US. Im talkin for residential and commercial. Iv had my connection for over 5 years and wouldnt go backl to cable if you shot me with it. The immense ‘width’ of a fiber pipe will not only insure data transfers happen securly but faster than cable can do as my upload speed is EQUAL to my download …and no need for a silly theory called PowerBoost.