The New Data Center Capital of America

crimeandpunishment writes "Move over Silicon Valley, here comes... Buffalo. Where the weather might actually be a big advantage. The recent opening of Yahoo's state-of-the-art data center, which uses the region's cooler climate and a high-tech 'chicken coop' design to dramatically lower energy costs is getting a lot of attention in the industry."

Not as cool as it used to be

[eln]

It used be that having people build data centers in your community meant lots of good jobs. These days, though, with advances in lights out management, you can build a huge data center and only need a few low-pay button pushers and forklift drivers on site. All of the high paid engineer and admin positions can be staffed anywhere, and usually end up being primarily existing staff who remain wherever they're already living.

Sure having some jobs coming in is better than no jobs coming in, but data centers alone are not going to transform a community into a high tech mecca any more than building a bunch of warehouses will.

Re:Not as cool as it used to be

[Jaime2]

It still might help. It should give us a better communication infrastructure and cause the big hardware vendors to locate more distribution centers and technicians in the area. The only reason the Apple was built in California was the locals had access to chips that weren't available to hobbiests elsewhere. Internet access and cheap servers are the foundations of the next generation of inventions.

Buffalo has good ping times

[inhuman.games]

Geographically speaking, I think Buffalo is better than Silicon Valley for a server -- if you have European customers. My server in Buffalo had good latency for users in both North America and Europe. My server in Silicon Valley had worse latency for my European users. I'm surprised there aren't more data centers in the New York area.

Re:They don't have NIAGARA FALLS though

[Anonymous Coward]

North Dakota has a not insignificant hydro dam on the Missouri River, and is in the midst of an energy boom. Buffalo, however, has suffered de-indistrialization at such a tragic amount that it is likely they have excess capacity easily available.

North Dakota does not need jobs. The unemployment rate there is the lowest in the nation in the low single digits while the national rate is . . . much much higher. Poster "i-c-electrons" saying North Dakota needs jobs is facile and ignorant. They don't need jobs, they need people.

Re:Silicon valley....

[mjwalshe]

Yes always struck me as odd that. When I worked at BT we had a duplicate dc the other side of London in case the thames flood barrier failed.

Ironically an IRA bomb almost took out this alternate DC - luckily an empty building took most of the blast.

Re:Yeah, right.

[Animats]

Is that actual open air? Wouldn't dirt and water in the air start causing problems?

It's probably not open air. My guess is that they have air-to-air heat exchangers [xetexinc.com] behind all those grills, so the heat is dumped into the cold ambient air. Mostly the same air goes round and round in the data center, which keeps the humidity in range. So there's not much work for the chillers; mostly it's just fans.