Speed and power can be seen as everything in today’s data intensive world and yes, every millisecond counts. But by how much and at what speed is the right speed? Is it critical for all services and applications to be in the fastest of locations? Does it add value to put the data center where power is? And how does this affect the choice of data center location investment?

There are business benefits from looking at locations away from the city. Reaching your market is important and there is no doubt that fiber latency (time delay from one networked point to another), resiliency, redundancy and capacity are critical in selecting the right-fit location. Take high-speed trading as an example. Here every millisecond advantage has a commercial impact.

The argument for latency
The annual trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is US$35 trillion a year, which is more than the GDP of China, UK and the US combined. Of this 55% is computer trading, processing thousands of trades per second (4.5 trillion transactions are performed each day around the world). Combined with the NYSE Amex options exchange, NYSE Euronext’s distinct exchange has an electronic trading platform capable of processing 250,000 orders and 1,500,000 quotes per second with a 2ms acknowledgment time.

Even reducing the cable lengths between computers and fiber are taken into consideration here. Chicago to NY is about 14.5ms to 13.1ms at a cost of $100m for fiber. This time distance has been reduced by 5ms in recent years at a cost of $30m using 22 line-of-sight microwave installations. This is how great the need of service is in this highly competitive market.

These speeds in real life terms can be compared with a camera flash at 5ms (and we blink on average at 120ms). Light travels 186 miles in 1ms. This means in the digital realm, Chicago just got 930 miles closer to NY with the paradox that it is only geographically 713 miles away.

But does this mean all infrastructure for services such as archive, email, social networking, search, retail, downloads, messaging, high performance computing, most cloud services and so on need to be provisioned from expensive city location?

Will an extra blink (120ms) take away anything from our online experience with our human-to-digital interactions?

Arguing against
The top-five most visited websites are Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo and Baidu. We can argue that all are cloud-based services. These web giants seek low cost of green power, ease-of-business, proximity to fiber, market reach and lower operational cost and they do this using location.

Yahoo’s Lockport site in New York State is a good example of a service reaching its market efficiently away from the city. It provided reduced operational costs (with only a fifth of the power costs against New York rates and by using green hydro power from Niagara falls) and provisioned a 20-year package for property tax and sales tax breaks (from the Lockport Industrial Development Agency Board).

The tax abatement alone is expected to reach $30m for building materials and equipment and it gets a 100% abatement on property tax for ten years. 

The savings for Yahoo in this case equate to millions of dollars a year in property tax, tens of millions a year in sales tax, tens of millions of dollars in savings in land price per acre and the same savings each year for power.

Similar principles of out-of-city locations apply to Facebook in Luleå, Sweden and Google in Hamina, Finland. The Norwegian software firm Opera is the world’s most popular mobile browser with more than 71m monthly users, who view 37bn pages per month – or 245 times the size of the US Library of Congress. It delivers this service from a data center in Iceland.

Climate counts too

Locations with cool climates can also add value – current industry conditions recommend by ASHRAE accept server inlet temperatures of 27 °C with a relative humidity of up to 80%. These figures greatly extend the reach regarding where you site your facility (think free cooling with access to green power). This approach goes against the industry standards seen only over five years ago.

The sector is seeing great advances in the automation of data center facilities, and cloud services are becoming more prevalent and relevant. This could move data center locations and designs to become more services specific, and change the way we view site selection as an industry as we move into the future.

Derek Webster now runs his own independent consultancy Andget.
 

This article first appeared in FOCUS issue 34. To read the full digital edition, click here. Or download a copy for the iPad from DCDFocus.