Northern Virginia cements spot as bit barn capital of the world with jigawatt capacity Northern Virginia – the bit barn capital of the world, the beating heart of our digital universe – has become the first regional market to reach 1,000MW of wholesale colocation capacity, according to real estate specialist CBRE. For comparison, London – the world’s second largest colo market - has just 559MW of capacity. CBRE …
The problem is, outside of the White House, there isn't a lot of wind in Northern Virginia. There are some wind farms in the Appalachian Mountains and a permit for preliminary studies of another and of an offshore wind farm but the are all 100+ miles away from Northern Virginia. As far as nuclear, Virginia as a whole gets 40% of its power from four aging nuclear plants. Their is a permit for preliminary studies of a fifth.
Virginia as a whole gets 40% of its power from four aging nuclear plants.
What sort of backup supply is there for this 1GW of datacentres handling 70% of the worlds internet traffic, then?
Clouds seem useful, but they do tend to blow away in a good puff of wind.
“What sort of backup supply is there for this 1GW of datacentres handling 70% of the worlds internet traffic, then?”
The 70% figure likely refers to MAE-EAST - the major Internet exchange for the east coast of the US. It’s very diverse and will use a fraction of that total power. It’s been around since the 80s rather than being one of these Jonny-come-lately cloud providers.
Big datacentres tend to get built where there's cheap electricity. Which means coal or nuclear. Windmills are too expensive and too intermittent, just as we learned when the Age of Wind gave way to the Age of Steam.
Well, some of us learned. West coast US is still behind the curve on that one. But like the article says, Virginia's long been Internet central with the likes of PSINet, UUnet etc springing up there. Not to mention proximity to East coast cables, domestic infrastructure and a lot of business customers.
@Jellied Eel: Do not forget hydropower.
The Itaipú hydroelectric dam that Paraguay shares with Brazil is the world's most powerful hydroelectric facility, but the Paraquyans have no other use for it than mining cryptocurrencies with an energy cost more than twice that of mining copper or gold.
Jigawatts? No.
Despite the rare and archaic pronunciation of Gigawatt with a soft 'g' sound featured in the truly brilliant film Back To The Future, it is never spelt with a 'J'.
Until today of course. . .
I love that film and have no axe to grind against the author, but to quote the notorious Wikipedia:
"Jigawatts are often referred to in Internet forums in order to make fun of someone's electrical knowledge."
Oww!
(1) "rare and archaic pronunciation of Gigawatt with a soft 'g' sound". Also such rare and archaic words as Giant, Giraffe, ....
(2) "Jigawatts are often referred to in Internet forums in order to make fun of someone's electrical knowledge." So that's why El Reg used the word, of course.
If the 'J' and the associated pronunciation were to become common currency for a thousand-million of anything, be it Jiga-Watts or Jiga-Bytes, our daily conversation would be littered with small reminders of one of the best and I think most enjoyed films ever made.
Given how much there is to be miserable about, this could only be a good thing, and I hope the author and entire readership of The Register will join me in campaigning for its universal adoption at the earliest opportunity.
Making fun in this case that data centers are measured in watts, not something more relevant like bits, bits/second, MIPs FLOPs or total storage, you know the stuff the Reg usually makes a big deal of.
Watts is power company spec..."computing per watt" is not a constant...
I agree that computing power should be measured in GFLOPS rather than GW, but the priority of the operators is profit.
Whilst the technically minded like ourselves will think in terms of how much computing can be done, owners think in terms of ROI - how much profit can be made, for a given investment.
A big part of that investment is how much power is laid on, whether it arrives via overhead or underground cables, with the latter costing a good deal more.
Once a facility is operational, it can be more cost effective to build new ones, rather than upgrade existing ones, though it depends on many factors.
Do you have anyway of breaking down the power usage of 50+ large data centres into the servers/storage/networking/environmental/etc they are likely to use other than pure guesswork?
The power stats come from a data centre industry specialist - they’re not that interested in the specifics of how customers choose to use them or how that changes over time and realistically, power will be distributed along the lines of:
Cooling << power distribution << servers < storage < networking < other.
As a guesstimate (using 12MW gives you 50k servers from https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/09/overall-data-center-costs/ with an efficiency rate of 1.45) and a midrange server provides around 100GFLOPS, you’re looking at:
(1000MW/12MW) * 50,000 servers * 100GFLOPS = 416 PFLOPS
I’d bump that down to account for a larger percentage of storage and networking given the location and lower average efficiency for older DCs to around 300-350 PFLOPS.
Why is server capacity being measured in power consumption, rather than something like GFLOPs?
It's the usual metric used when discussing data centres (not individual servers) - it is a fixed characteristic of the data centre fabric, limited by power, backup power and cooling. In a data centre of any size you can expect servers to be replaced on an almost daily basis and compute capacity to gradually increase over time.
Added to which for colo facilities even the operator is unlikely to know. You contract for so much space, connectivity, power and a small number of additional services IP addresses, remote power management come to mind. The issue of what processors or how much storage is in a given piece of customer equipment never comes up.
The data centre alley is considered to be the birthplace of the commercial internet, since it’s where AOL was running its dial-up operations in 1996
AOL? Really? How about UUNET, they were headquartered in Loudoun and started in late 80s. Their AlterNet backbone still has some presence in traceroutes. Sure they have had few owners since, latest being Verizon who at the moment seem to be more obsessed about 5G than anything else.
So really AOL is quite a newcomer.
First used ARPANET in 1985 and I am pretty sure we were using a local (213) area code commercial gateway by 1987. Saved on long distance tariffs which were still pretty eye watering at the time. It was dialup on a 1200 baud modem.
First time I heard a serious discussion about commercial internet access was in early 1993. Company i was working for in Berkeley was tired of the modem drop outs and low speed (28.8K) and was getting bids from a bunch of local providers for a dedicated line. I think the speed was around 200K, straight to the backbone, and was more than $1K / a month..
By the time AOL got into the internet business there were lots of other players already there. Not just small ISP's but the likes of big online services like Compuserve, Prodigy etc. In the early days Apples online service eWorld had the nicest integration of both. Online service and www. But then DSL came along in 1996 and that was the end of that era.
AOL were very late to the internet show and as the internet destroyed their very strange business model (based on an accounting loophole) they fought a bitter rearguard action to stop it killing them. Which it eventually did. But only after they had taken Time Warner for $100 billion plus.
Virginia has had >50% of the worlds Internet traffic since the mid-90s and experienced a number of serious storms with minimal impact. The only external event that I can think of that has caused serious disruption was 9/11 and my understanding that was down to traffic levels rather than any actual equipment damage/outage.
In terms of design, it’s more geographic reality of being the meeting point for Europe and the majority of the US, particularly around New York/Chicago/London/Frankfurt for financial transactions which have driven initial investment that others have then capitalised on.
Is there sufficient resilience? I suspect the answer is yes for anything less than a significant attack, particularly given the rumoured size of AWS/Google’s private networks.
Your comment is inaccurate. The most Ashburn gets is the tail-end of hurricanes if they're really really bad, and never blizzards. By wackos I assume you mean terrorism. Ashburn is 30 miles away from Washington, DC. I suppose Dulles International Airport could be considered a target, but even it's 10 miles away. This isn't a bad area for infrastructure of this type.
Yes, Virginia is very large. Yes, in the US private peering predominates so as to make actual measurements between regions difficult. But speaking as someone who's worked for a large US based content provider, there's no way 70% of their *US* traffic "passed through Virginia", let alone their worldwide traffic. 30% sounds more like it, and I'm sure it's less now.
In terms of overall wattage, my home province British Columbia (i.e. in Canada!) has ELEVEN TIMES the available wattage for power generation at 11,000 Megawatts or 11 Gigawatts. Virginia is a PIP SQUEAK TINY STATE in terms of the HUUUUUUUUGE POWERHOUSES of electrical generation which are in order of available power generation:
1) Quebec Hydro (45,000 megawatts or 45 gigawatts)
2) Ontario Hydro (37,000 megawatts or 37 gigawatts)
3) BC Hydro (11,000 megawatts or 11 Gigawatts)
which are the largest hydro producers in North America. There are nuclear power plant systems that are larger but for available power nothing beats hydro-generated electricity.
Having promotion to draw widespread attention to a nucleus of what makes today's global business work located in one small area, it surely becomes of interest to evil intention to disrupt and destroy. I hope power supply and other factors that could collapse service like a house of cards are robust.
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