“And the Skies are all Cloudy all Day…”

Written on February 25, 2008  |  by RP Mickler  |  Leave a Comment  | 

Google’s Cloud Darkens The Dalles

I live in Battle Ground, Washington, which is downstream of The Dalles, Oregon, by eighty miles on the Columbia River. Since 2006, search engine titan Google has been in the process of constructing a massive facility to house a server farm powered by the cheap hydro-electricty generated by our region.

Its campus would be as big as two football fields; 68,680 SQFT of three warehouse spaces will be used to hold their servers along with 18,800 SQFT of cooling stations, sticking four stories into the sky. The campus will also feature administration buildings and transient employee dormitories. It’s estimated that all three server buildings will be online in 2011 and will demand 103 megawatts of electricity – that’s enough juice to power 82,000 homes, or, a city the size of Tacoma, Washington. Real estate prices have jumped 40-percent and 200+ permanent jobs will be created in a town of 12,000.

However, that’s not all. Microsoft and Yahoo are also investing billions in the region, having announced big data centers of their own in Wenatchee and Quincy, Washington about 130 miles to the north of the Gorge. All of these companies hope to tap into the inexpensive electricity and abundance of fiber optics left behind by the dot-com bust of the last decade.

Why are these companies investing in such massive-scale operations and data centers? It revolves around an idea called Cloud Computing, and Clouds could represent the next generation of massive industry in the Pacific Northwest region. Cloud computing will support all of the next generation of web-based applications and services – instead of loading applications on their own hard drives, consumers will use applications available from the web. Data will be stored in the proverbial “cloud” of a vendor and accessible from anywhere, anytime, by anyone. Clouds were permit subscription-based licensing models and free web-based productivity applications – like Microsoft’s Windows Live or Office Live intitiative, and, Google’s Spreadsheet, Writely, or Picassa.

Clouds present new opportunities for the small business. Instead of hosting their own servers and managing their own applications, small businesses could “rent” server and application functions at contained expense levels and scale to meet their growth needs without significant investment in talent, facilities, or equipment. Cloud computing will transition small businesses into treating data processing as a utility: cheap, widely available, and ubiquitous.

It will be interesting to watch as the PacNW and other regions compete for becoming the centers for the new information age industrial era – creating and managing factories of information.

R