There's something eerily true about TFA's observation that data centers have a big footprint but really low headcount. I work in the Atlanta area, and it's amazing how long you can work in tech without ever setting foot in a data center or even seeing one from the outside. They are truly highly invisible infrastructure, hidden behind more and more layers of abstraction. I'm all for abstractions that don't leak, but I'm not sure it's a purely good thing to get so disconnected from the hardware layer.
I used to tag along with our sysadmin sometimes, back when I worked in a place that ran its own data centers - a decade ago - and they aren't really enjoyable places (noisy, not built for human inhabitants), but there's something nice about seeing the actual hardware that runs your applications. It kind of keeps things grounded.
People have probably seen more data centers than they think, and just not noticed. They just look like large buildings if you pass by on the highway.
There used to be a lot of telephone buildings in the US. AT&T built them right in the middle of communities in many cases, but they attempted to match local architecture. Most people never realized they were there.
So many buildings downtown were getting filled up with telecom and data equipment that the Atlanta city council passed a law about a decade ago to keep it from pushing out all other uses. There are lots of historic buildings that are little more than facades wrapped around these places due to how much fiber runs through downtown making it a very attractive place to locate. The city wants more people downtown so they'd prefer more housing, offices, retail, and hotels (human, not telecom). The law seems to have worked or at least contributed to helping to rebalance uses there.
Tangential, but you might like this to mutter upon in the shower:
>"Ask HN: At what point do the Cloud's datacenters become national security sites?" [0]
Its an interesting aspect to think about when taking a high level objective look at the importance of Datacenters on all aspects of modern society.
>>"...Companies like AWS, running data centers for the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC), demonstrate close collaboration between private entities and defense agencies. The question remains: are major cloud service providers actively involved in a national security strategy to protect the private internet infrastructure that underpins the global economy, or does the responsibility solely rest with individual companies?..."
ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) is based in Atlanta. All of the NYSE and other exchanges they own are in Atlanta area. There are 26,932,748 people in the Piedmont Atlantic region Atlanta-Raleigh. Which has been growing like crazy. This is what drove the data center movement, not corporate welfare called state incentives. They would need the power either way.
I’m sure the article is total wrong about the tax incentives like you say, but ICE AND NYSE had their colocation center and servers in New Jersey, not Georgia. They don’t have servers in GA except maybe for the printers in their office.
What is the Piedmont Atlantic region? There’s no way there’s 26 million people in those cities. The combined population of GA, NC, and SC is less than 27 million people, which includes all of the costal regions and farm areas. Are you including Savannah and Charleston ?
Maybe the company has offices and does some development there, but the data centers themselves running the electronic stock exchanges are all located just across the Hudson from Wall Street in New Jersey:
I live in "The cloud" and the key driver to data center growth is power routing prior to or concurrent with DC development.
This is why Amazon is investing so heavily into lobbying my county supervisors into destroying our aquifer and farmland to run power [1] to their new DCs
The fact that the whole state of Georgia didn't figure this basic math equation out is unsurprising. Hopefully this elementary planning oversight will make their expansion totally fail.
I'm a different person, but speaking as a GA resident I kind of agree. Very little gets done that doesn't support the status quo. I'll take this an excuse to list a few personal grievances:
* Georgia DOT is notorious for not building infrastructure. Their gameplan consists almost entirely of maintaining & expanding existing highways/arterials. This isn't for lack of funding, mind you -- last year GDOT had a big budget surplus and all they did with it was refund a bunch of vehicle taxes (this happens surprisingly often)
* Related to the above... ask a GA resident how they feel about metal plates. If that person regularly drives, they'll know.
* The City of Atlanta, despite supporting millions of jobs, only has 500,000 residents. It is perpetually operating on a shoestring budget and the state makes a point of avoiding reinvestment into the city (indeed, slashing the city budget is a common campaign promise)
* Despite (more likely because of...) an almost chronic shortage of cash, the City of Atlanta government is rife with misappropriation and self-dealing. There is little will to do anything about it because of how regionally polarized the politics here are
* The City of Atlanta regularly trades places with Miami as the U.S.'s "most unequal major city" by gini coefficient. We used to be securely #1 before South Fulton seceded from the CoA in 2017 (Tragically relevant: South Fulton is now America's blackest city)
* Related to the above... regions regularly threaten to seceed from the CoA because they are (understandably) frustrated with how poorly things are run. These movements to seceed often succeed. Unfortunately, it's just plain hard to run any city in this state, so both parties usually come out of the deal faring worse than before
With that being said, Georgia isn't a hellscape or anything. Yes... we do punch well above our weightclass in the twin realms of corruption and political infighting, but on the other hand the rent's pretty affordable and we have a really nice forest!
Router/switches don't transform the data, they send it to its destination. Most of the power in data center is used by computers, not the routers, switches, and load balcners. Now if you said that data center acts like one big computer, that would be accurate.
Plus, power doesn't go out, all the power is used by the data center. Mixing data and power leads to confusion.
I agree with the transformation part, and almost said one big transistor or computer but don’t think either are right either. I still think switch is closest.
Computers turn electricity mostly into a display (monitor) (I’m not calling out heat cause every computer does that)
The data piped out of data centers almost purely specifically routed packets - so that looks more like a switch to me
Georgia the country has about half the land of Georgia the state in the US, and Georgia the country has about half the population of Atlanta alone (even less population when compared to the entire US state of Georgia). I think that huge difference in popularity contributes largely to why "Georgia" often refers to the the US state on this site
The article also mentions water needs, which might end up being the bigger issue as the state has had to implement severe water restrictions during the last couple of droughts. The population has grown quite a bit since the last major drought and not much in the way of new water resources have come online since then.
Readit News
I used to tag along with our sysadmin sometimes, back when I worked in a place that ran its own data centers - a decade ago - and they aren't really enjoyable places (noisy, not built for human inhabitants), but there's something nice about seeing the actual hardware that runs your applications. It kind of keeps things grounded.
There used to be a lot of telephone buildings in the US. AT&T built them right in the middle of communities in many cases, but they attempted to match local architecture. Most people never realized they were there.
It was quite the shock to go from the grimey city alley to a perfectly clean, high tech, and highly secure interior.
>"Ask HN: At what point do the Cloud's datacenters become national security sites?" [0]
Its an interesting aspect to think about when taking a high level objective look at the importance of Datacenters on all aspects of modern society.
>>"...Companies like AWS, running data centers for the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC), demonstrate close collaboration between private entities and defense agencies. The question remains: are major cloud service providers actively involved in a national security strategy to protect the private internet infrastructure that underpins the global economy, or does the responsibility solely rest with individual companies?..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38975443
https://www.ice.com/fixed-income-data-services/access-and-de...
(This is also the top google result)
The population in 2018 was 27M, probably much higher now.
https://www.ice.com/fixed-income-data-services/access-and-de...
General power goes in > Routed power goes out
It's basically 1:1 minus efficiency losses
I live in "The cloud" and the key driver to data center growth is power routing prior to or concurrent with DC development.
This is why Amazon is investing so heavily into lobbying my county supervisors into destroying our aquifer and farmland to run power [1] to their new DCs
The fact that the whole state of Georgia didn't figure this basic math equation out is unsurprising. Hopefully this elementary planning oversight will make their expansion totally fail.
[1]https://protectpwc.org/
If you zoom out, a datacenter converts electricity into >99% heat and <1% blinky lights.
Quite the backhanded compliment. What do you have against the state of Georgia?
The reality is Georgia is kicking butt in terms of attracting economic development, especially industrial.
* Georgia DOT is notorious for not building infrastructure. Their gameplan consists almost entirely of maintaining & expanding existing highways/arterials. This isn't for lack of funding, mind you -- last year GDOT had a big budget surplus and all they did with it was refund a bunch of vehicle taxes (this happens surprisingly often)
* Related to the above... ask a GA resident how they feel about metal plates. If that person regularly drives, they'll know.
* The City of Atlanta, despite supporting millions of jobs, only has 500,000 residents. It is perpetually operating on a shoestring budget and the state makes a point of avoiding reinvestment into the city (indeed, slashing the city budget is a common campaign promise)
* Despite (more likely because of...) an almost chronic shortage of cash, the City of Atlanta government is rife with misappropriation and self-dealing. There is little will to do anything about it because of how regionally polarized the politics here are
* The City of Atlanta regularly trades places with Miami as the U.S.'s "most unequal major city" by gini coefficient. We used to be securely #1 before South Fulton seceded from the CoA in 2017 (Tragically relevant: South Fulton is now America's blackest city)
* Related to the above... regions regularly threaten to seceed from the CoA because they are (understandably) frustrated with how poorly things are run. These movements to seceed often succeed. Unfortunately, it's just plain hard to run any city in this state, so both parties usually come out of the deal faring worse than before
With that being said, Georgia isn't a hellscape or anything. Yes... we do punch well above our weightclass in the twin realms of corruption and political infighting, but on the other hand the rent's pretty affordable and we have a really nice forest!
Plus, power doesn't go out, all the power is used by the data center. Mixing data and power leads to confusion.
Computers turn electricity mostly into a display (monitor) (I’m not calling out heat cause every computer does that)
The data piped out of data centers almost purely specifically routed packets - so that looks more like a switch to me
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... also vehicles, heat pumps, and whatever else is currently burning hydrocarbons. Everywhere needs more electric power.