Re: How many racks?
So the other $197m is probably being spent on equipment,
Land, grid power connection, mutiply redundant power backup, backhaul & comms, the barn itself, site security, servers to do the data processing in addition to the storage racks (this is big data, there's going to need to be some serious processing clout). $197m is consistent with reported costs for other enormo DCs.
If you're using AWS or any competent hosting provider you get all of those at their cost averaged across mutiple users, or maybe even their marginal cost if there's an anchor client for whose use the DC was actually built, so you get those far, far cheaper than you could do them yourself. But that means you're dependent upon the host, and requires trust, adds some counterparty risk and has low transparency for the data owner. Insource it all (as Ford appear to be) and they incur the full cost, but they also have a lot more control. Whether a car company will be any good at managing a DC, and managing data securely and effectively we'll see, but in their place I suspect I'd conclude that £200m is chump change when each new car model has development costs of around $5 billion.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
