OVH to establish North American headquarters and first U.S. data center(governor.virginia.gov) |
OVH to establish North American headquarters and first U.S. data center(governor.virginia.gov) |
That cheap power is another reason why Québec is a big manufacturer of aluminum which is an extremely energy intensive process.
While I'm not sure I believe the "We're Great!" first thing I found with Google indicating the possibility of a rate even lower by a few tenths of a cent, it looks good ... except of course per Google the exchange rate is running 1-0.75. Still, their power should be pretty affordable, I'd more worry about tradeoffs in more expensive real estate vs. easier hiring of talent and the other advantages of being in a major telecom metro area.
And their are other advantages as noted by others in this sub-thread, and doesn't AWS have its biggest region in NoVA?
I also stumbled upon an article that said it was (at the time, in 2012) the largest data center in the world. That doesn't sound right.
How many people typically work at a data center for one of the largest hosting companies in the world?
Because 54 jobs seems kind of low, no?
Virginia is on a huge high-tech growth track due to the increased tech thrust in the Fed Gov space. The state is even reviving towns with tax benefits for computing centers in remote parts.
While this isn't along the famed "Tech Corridor" in Virginia, it could be the beginning of a "Tech Triangle" that could quickly grow to a second place tech hub to SV.
That being said, I wouldn't count this as "new node" in the Tech Corridor, it's simply a good site in a lower-tax neighboring county, but still in DC's exurban western periphery. When other parts of Virginia away from a 20-mile radius of Dulles are seeing this kind of investment, then we can talk about a Virginia Tech Triangle.
Here's a recent article that says Google employees 400 people in their Oklahoma facility, which is enormous.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/businesshomepage1/new-google-facil...
I am actually surprised it is as high as 54, if you visit some of the really huge datacenters in Quincy, WA or The Dalles, OR you might walk through the entire facility and see 3 people working on a "busy" day.
OVH provides lots of leased servers so you need larger staff than a pure colo. They're also calling this US HQ so add some sales, support and operations staff that would/will be remote at the second US datacenter.
I think they are going to be very disappointed if that is the amount of jobs they expect.
There is some interesting information from Facebooks datacenter in Oregon from 2011 here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/prineville-data-center/press-...
> Over the course of the project, more than 1,300 people have worked on the site – an average of 250 workers a day. When completed, Facebook has committed to hire 35 full-time employees to run and maintain the data center.
Data-centers don't do many things themselves, using manual labor; instead, they're just large machines that consume purified resources (power, live fiber, provisioned equipment) and turn it into APIs. But purifying those resources for the DC's consumption does require people—and DCs need a lot of each of the resources they consume. For every N data-centres that get built in a state, that state probably employs a good few more power-plant workers and linemen, for just one effect.
A lot of the other roles are field service type things that don't use local workers.
That's not a bad thing, just not the end-all, be-all. if the building of data centers or similar facilities are a trend, you will build up good local capability to build these facilities and may start winning other business.
April 2013: 25 jobs in secure document and card printing
March 2014: 40 jobs in new lumber mill
August 2014: 25 jobs in manufacturing coating spray for aircraft turbine parts
August 2014: 25 jobs in new lumber mill
August 2014: 500 jobs in parts for automotive engines
October 2014: 75 new jobs in parts of automatic transmissions
December 2014: 97 new jobs in HQ consolidation for medical device company
April 2015: 160 new jobs in food processing for fruits
May 2015: 100 jobs in lighting fixture manufacturing
January 2016: 50 jobs in tamper-evident label manufacturing
February 2016: 50 jobs in ingredients for cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries
March 2016: 15 jobs in new lumber mill
March 2016: 1800 new jobs in client support and consulting
September 2016: 50 jobs in paper towel manufacturing
[1] http://www.virginiabusiness.com/search/google?q=jobs+grant
most of the people who work on the actual facility are vendor staff, i.e. hvac specialists, power system specialists, the people from caterpillar that maintain the diesel gens, etc. for that matter, even security is outsourced (but they are still full time @ the facility).
everyone else is a customer, coming in and out to do internet-y things in the cloud aka working on computers in datacenters, same as it ever was.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/business/dealbook/micro...
https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/articles/a2294.how-ovh-expand-in-...
I wouldn't worry about a personal seed box, but some pretty big video hosts work with them closely.
[1] https://www.ovh.com/us/news/articles/a1806.new-york-scouting...
You exactly know what you get performance wise, e.g. no bad influence from some random neighboring VM. Security is also a concern with virtualization, isolation between VMs turned out to be not that perfect as desired. You can also roll your own virtualization exactly tailored to your needs. "Cloud" VMs also tend to be rather expensive if you need them continuously, you pay for the flexibility they provide.
What!?
Companies like OVH that sell low priced are basically real estate investors (and, in fact, a number of real estate investment firms are large data centre owners) with various degrees of value-adds, but where the way to grow your profit margins is to identify lower priced property and cheap power relative to your competition and wait for your capital investment to appreciate.
AWS/Azure/GCE on the other hand are tech play where they are getting their huge margins on value adds or perceived value adds and are much less directly affected
Was this worth 54 (unspecified types) jobs? I guess It's not that bad since it doesn't mention property tax exemption which usually goes along with new developments.
Plus, once the area infrastructure, local zoning/regulations, and talent pool gets built out to support this type of project, it becomes a lot more attractive for other companies to bring similar projects.
Tax exemptions to attract business can get real shady and dubious, but it's not just the permanent, direct jobs you have to factor in. The potential positive externalities in this case seem like a solid case for tax exemptions. And the grant helps absorb some of the cost of getting local infrastructure in place that'll be needed to support it; infrastructure that'll benefit more than just OVH.
Of course they need 9 weeks and that's actually pretty good, considering what my procurement timetables look like for facilities my company owns. Shit, I can't even get 52U to the loading dock in 9 weeks.
You don't know what you don't know.
If you can estimate the power you need and/or use a lot of bandwidth, OVH can be much, much cheaper.
If you want a proper /64 block and support for it you need to get a server from their SoYouStart or OVH branded offerings.
If you want to take advantage of the prices of providers like OVH, use colo or dedicated servers from those kind of providers for "base load" for their cost, and tie in cloud resources for traffic spikes or batch jobs.
EDIT: As pointed out elsewhere, though, 200 servers is way above the point where hiring - or contracting with someone - to rack and maintain your own equipment in a colo should be at the very least considered, with some caveats (e.g. location - rack space rental is largely correlated with local land prices, so if you're in a property hotspot dedicated servers maybe remain cost-effective vs. colo facilities within short enough travel up to larger numbers of servers.
I had 5 VPSs and whenever it was time for renewal, one of the VPSs would turn off ~5 days prematurely (before the renewal date). I contacted support multiple times about the error in their billing system until I got too frustrated and migrated last month.
Hey, EU customers who want a POP in the US -- come use our new servers! We checked, definitely no SIGINT bugs left behind. :)
If they really want to access it and are doing covert operations I don't think being in the US will stop them.
I might be naive, but as far as I know there's no question that data is always safer if it stays in datacenters in Europe rather than in the US (which is why OVH is going to great lengths to separate their US entity as much as possible from the French one, and also why their first step in North America was Canada and not the US).
EDIT: As suggested below by toomuchtodo, at this level of deployment - Colo would be cheaper.
Its not cost effective compared to hiring ops and colo'ing it yourself. Once you're large enough, you hit tipping points:
* When to move from cloud to dedicated equipment
* When to move from dedicated equipment to someone else's colo (usually Equinix, but lots of providers in this space with varying levels of "warm fuzzies", which would cover on site techs, power and network redundancy, diesel commitments, and so on)
* When to move from someone else's colo to your own datacenter
(or in the other direction, depending on business requirements)
It also helps that US tax code (Sec 179) provides gracious depreciation schedules for physical compute/network/etc, which means that profit spread between cloud providers and you running your own gear goes back into your business or into your pocket
Disclaimer: 15 years of ops experience, including selling hosting to Fortune 500 companies as well as helping companies move from cloud to on-prem as well as the other way around. I've had to run cost/benefit analysis for this most of my career.
There's a sweet spot between 1 server and some number, say into the hundreds, where OVH is still cost effective. Beyond that you'll absolutely want to roll with your own gear because you can negotiate for a whole cage instead of partial racks.
We know from experience that public cloud is a huge money sinkhole compared to running your own cloud on bare metal (we use proxmox).
I'm sure you know operating costs better than we do though, we don't have our own Datacenter.
200 servers (at least the one we were interested in) would cost us around $22k on OVH each month. That means if I remove the personal that I would have to hire, the cost of servers is now down to $6k/month (200/12). For that money you can't really find a better option.
In our case, where we are running thousands of severs on any given time, the flexibility is much more important than price. So we built our service around pre-emptible instances on GCE (the same as spot on AWS). You can't beat dedicated server in performance, but it's close enough and they're making for it by having a great infrastructure.
https://www.ovh.com/fr/support/service-client/support-vip.xm...
Edit: English here under support button https://www.ovh.ie/support/contact-us/
The cloud part was just an example of a tipping point and not the main point of the comment.
We are not a direct cost center that can be discussed in those terms. Our insight will reduce capital and operational expenditure beyond our salary, because that operations hire would have told you how insane of an idea paying $22,000/mo for four cabinets of gear is and why a capital tradeoff with depreciation is a fiduciary responsibility to your investors and shareholders. You can buy at least a dozen U for that each month and then pay for nothing but where it lives with a dash of break-fix to taste.
I can put four cabinets of gear in a colocation for a quarter or less than that if you'd swing a little capital. You are wasting money on poor operations architecture and design and you don't have anybody to really tell you.
Even beyond that operations is a skill, much like marketing. I know a lot of people think they can fake it for a while (and they usually can), but after a point it's time to act like a grown up company and bring someone who does nothing but think about this shit on board. Security, performance, remediation, all the system level grunt work you shouldn't be concerning yourself with as engineers. Or you can keep throwing multiple operations salaries at your four cabinet OVH deal and keep getting ripped off.
> "You can buy at least a dozen U for that each month and then pay for nothing but where it lives." We don't need dozen a month. We need hundreds now. We may not need them in 6 months though and then what? Will I rent them out?
Think of it as putting an intelligent layer between your demand metrics and your server fleet. I live for utilization, just like you live for your product. Hire an operations nerd who does and your company will be much better off for it; based on description it sounds like you or the other engineers are already involved in operations anyway, so you probably won't need two. Hire one and let them tell you.
Whatever. We'll just redo the collo vs GCE comparison accounting for the wizard fee and a margin of error on his future guess:
- Should be at least $200k/year (USA) or £100k/year (UK) for that kind of skill. How many of such wizard do we need? This price is only for one.
- Add 100% on the expected hardware costs. Because hardware is cheap, what is expensive is buying the wrong hardware and having to buy it again.
Experience and knowledge isn't wizardry or magic, but as a business owner you're free to burn up your cash on pride if that's what you'd like to do. Not every problem's solution is a google search or API call away.
The word you should have focused on was 'magic'. In the same way that magic does not exist, it is not possible to plan future capacity with accuracy. It can even get worse if the system is of limited size because the time spent on analysing and planning can quickly cover the savings.
The only way to have good predictions is to already have the systems running in production [for months], with a [mostly] static user base, running applications that don't evolve, and never add any additional service. Given these circumstances, we could have good metrics on current usage and make good prediction on the future... except that to be at this point the hardware has had to be bought already.
I...what? Capacity Planning for Unpredictable Growth is literally SRE 103. It's hard and will have a margin of error, yes, but it's not bloody magic. The "magic" is in identifying and collecting the correct metrics that somewhat model the abstracted utilizations of the property, because almost everyone picks the wrong ones; this is situational so there is no blanket advice to offer except that load average is almost certainly wrong, as well as consulting only one metric. If you're working capacity from five or six key application metrics you're probably on the right path.
SRE is, quite specifically, application operations engineering. If you can't model your application's growth I'd be more inclined to call you an SA. (There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, to be clear, even speaking as an SRE. And I am aware several valley companies are diluting the term.)