Data Center building battles across the U.S.

Located in the Oregon State Prineville Town Plateau http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/1560.html ">facebook Data Center Park

In the west of Oregon State, just over 150 miles from Portland, there is a small town of just 10,000 residents, Prineville, where you can truly feel the rapid development of the Internet.

Prineville is now an internet powerhouse. The data center here supports the status updates and photos of about 8.5 million users in Facebook. And millions more users will also get music and videos through here-and Apple will also build a data center to support its itunes and icloud apps.

This wonderful prospect was unthinkable a few years ago. If someone had said that building a large data center in the middle of the town of Oregon State, and more than one, it would have been a delusional dream. In fact, ten years ago I started reporting data center areas, the most important infrastructure being in the center of the largest cities in the United States, close to customers and the focus of the fibre-optic arteries.

From the city center to the outlying areas

Typical data center buildings include 60th Hudson Street, New York and 111th Eighth Avenue. These huge buildings are mostly transit centers, printing plants and other traditional industries remains.

Now, the largest data centers are being built in places like Prineville, Quincy Washington or western North Carolina. The common feature of these places is the ability to provide sufficient land to accommodate large scale infrastructure, including hundreds of thousands of servers, and the power needed to run them.

Not only that, these cities also offer additional tax incentives to reduce the cost of data center operators buying land and servers. Of course, a good natural environment also makes the server cool enough to take advantage of the cool air outside, without the need for refrigeration, which in turn weakens the data center's operating costs.

Clearly, the pursuit of cheap electricity and lower taxes has changed the face of the data center industry. It has become a new trend to place remote areas away from users. But instead of changing the big shift in manufacturing maps to countries such as manufacturing from Europe and the US to China, the location of the data center is not a 0 and a game-the existing data center hubs are also thriving.

Different categories of data centers

The reason for this change is the diversity of data center user needs. In recent years, data center construction has begun to no longer follow the traditional "snowflake" pattern (secretly customizable, and no two data centers are exactly the same).

Now, there are three main types of data centers, each with different construction and operating standards:

Managed and connected hubs (Colo & Connectivity Hubs): host-managed service providers place facilities close to customers and network-intensive interconnect points. It is common in northern Virginia State, the big New York market, Chicago, Dallas and Silicon Valley.

Single Tenant enterprise Data Center: Control and security are key differences in these facilities. Its main markets include northern New Jersey, Atlanta and the Texas State metropolitan area (including Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio).

Large data centers that extend outward (Scale out): Huge facilities that support cloud computing, very unique, large in size and inexpensive hardware. Electricity prices are the main drivers of these facilities, combined with tax incentives and fresh cold air, which is more suited to the cooling of equipment and the environment.

The first two types of data center location and preparation generally will not cause much concern. But big data centres for brands such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple are different, and they are the targets of state governments seeking local economic growth.

Because of the high level of automation in these data centers, many jobs are often not available. As a result, they do not seem to create jobs and spur economic growth.

New economic symbol

However, these data centres are politically significant. They are not related to employment and traditional economy, but a symbol of the new economy, is the local success to the digital economic transformation of the intuitive embodiment. As a result, governors and lawmakers in the United States attach great importance to the value of Google, Facebook or Apple in building data center projects locally.

That is why North Carolina, which has won three consecutive wins in the data center scramble, is also offering a more aggressive incentive policy for other new projects. This trend will continue for many years, and more states will offer concessions to data centers across the United States.

This competition will intensify as the Internet continues to change the economy. In the future, there will be more large data centers in remote towns that you have never heard of before.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)