
OVH to establish North American headquarters and first U.S. data center - ers35
http://governor.virginia.gov/newsroom/newsarticle?articleId=17975
======
walrus01
One of the reasons why the massive OVH datacenter is in its particular
location in Quebec is the extremely cheap power from Quebec Hydro. At one time
I checked and the large customer rate was 5.6 cents (Canadian!) per kWh. I am
curious how much they are going to pay in VA and why they didn't choose to
build a datacenter somewhere in OR or WA near the Columbia River hydroelectric
systems instead.

~~~
roymurdock
Probably because they're aiming to provide a private government cloud and they
want to be geographically closer to key clients - Fauquier county is a 20 min
drive from DC and big co's in West Virginia. Also because the incentives
Virginia is providing ($1.25m in cash, cuts on sales and use tax, cash for
employee training) make up for a higher energy cost - especially the tax cuts.

------
tiffanyh
>> "Virginia successfully competed against North Carolina for the project,
which will create 54 new jobs"

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?

~~~
saulrh
I'm just surprised as the absolute magnitude of the number. Virginia has
hundreds of thousands of unemployed right now; 54 is probably within
measurement error. Even if they're off by orders of magnitude, 500 is a drop
in the bucket, and 5000 is barely noticeable. It just seems _weird_ to me that
that number is big enough to be worth trumpeting from the hills.

~~~
dorfsmay
On top of 54 jobs there are additional tax on profit + all indirect benefits,
more computer hardware maintenance, HVAC install and maintenance, etc...

~~~
tssva
Usually the big tax gain for the locality is property tax on the equipment
located within the data center.

~~~
patrickg_zill
Not sure that all municipalities charge a tax on the servers. However they get
taxes on power and utilities like water. Also a larger base of utilities means
the capital costs are spread across more billing.

~~~
tssva
They may not all do so, but the largest data center concentrations in the US
are in Loudoun County, VA and in the Dallas/Fort Worth areas. You will pay
local tax on your equipment in both locations.

------
mooneater
I would love OVH if they would finally implement automatic recurring credit
card billing. Ive been asking them for years. What a horrible single point of
failure that is.

~~~
gnyman
I believe this is due to them being a French entity and the French laws or
banking systems requiring this. But I could be wrong, I'm basing it on the
fact that Gandi had the same thing unit they created a US Entity which could
do the billing. I'm guessing this is not far away for OVH either now.

~~~
hyperknot
Their biggest competitor - Online.net - is also French, yet offers recurring
payments and even PayPal subscriptions.

------
IgorPartola
So does this make my data with them fall under the category of American
companies and is not subject to warrant less searches? Or only their VA data
center?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Based on a Microsoft ruling, I believe only their US data center. As always,
take measures to keep your data out of the US if it's important to you.

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/business/dealbook/micro...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/business/dealbook/microsoft-
case-shows-the-limits-of-a-data-privacy-law.html)

~~~
IgorPartola
Out or in? Because if it's out, it's subject to the warrantless searches,
right? But if it's in, the company can be compelled to give the NSA access?

~~~
seszett
If it's out of the US, the US don't have jurisdiction and I don't see them
breaking into OVH's datacenters in France anytime soon to get to your data.

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).

~~~
IgorPartola
I suppose my communication with the server would be encrypted, but wouldn't
the NSA try to store all the back and forth transfers between my US-based
laptop and my OVH server in France?

~~~
toomuchtodo
They could, which is why all of your communications between you and your OVH
server should use high grade encryption (SSH, SSL, etc).

------
stonogo
This is the third time OVH has been just about to build a US datacenter in the
past five years.

~~~
ryporter
Yeah, I guess this means that their plans to build a data center in New York
in 2016 fell through. [1] I love OVH, but I've been waiting for a while for a
second data center in North America. I hope they build this one.

[1] [https://www.ovh.com/us/news/articles/a1806.new-york-
scouting...](https://www.ovh.com/us/news/articles/a1806.new-york-scouting-
speed-up-north-american-growth)

------
jpalomaki
I believe reasonably priced dedicated servers (from companies like OVH,
Hetzner) will be big thing in future. Cloud based virtual machines are useful
for many tasks, but it is also pretty nice to get 256GB/6 core/4TB machine for
140€ per month.

~~~
ju-st
It should be a big thing, but their marketing/hype machine is seriously
lacking. As a first step, building a data center presence in SV/west coast
would help.

~~~
kyledrake
Their ability to do automated recurring billing, amazingly, is also lacking. I
really wish they would fix that already. It's kindof a deal breaker for most
people.

~~~
slau
How so? I've had servers with OVH and Online.net for about 10 years, and only
had to look at the billing forms when I moved countries.

------
bhouston
OVH has great prices, especially on the SoYouStart line.
[https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/essential-
servers/](https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/essential-servers/)

~~~
webtechgal
And these dedi boxes (also from OVH) are priced almost unbelievably low:
[https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml](https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml)

~~~
garaetjjte
"IPv6: /128"

What!?

~~~
snuxoll
The Kimsufi line is a bunch of low-end boxes not meant for serious work, they
technically allocate every server a /64 but you can't add RDNS records for
anything but the "/128" you've been allocated.

If you want a proper /64 block and support for it you need to get a server
from their SoYouStart or OVH branded offerings.

------
WhitneyLand
How much has the data center growth curve been dampened by Amz/Msft/Goog
offerings?

~~~
vidarh
Good question. I don't think it has that much of an effect, as none of the
above compete with businesses like OVH on price at all.

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

------
burger_moon
> Governor McAuliffe approved a $1.25 million grant from the Commonwealth’s
> Opportunity Fund to assist Fauquier County with the project. The company
> will also be eligible to receive sales and use tax exemptions on equipment.

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.

~~~
cosmie
I'm not sure what the average salaries look like for data center employees,
but assuming a reasonable, round figure of $50k/year, that's about $2.7mm/year
in additional area income. Which has a multiplicative effect as it gets spent
in the local economy and supports _other_ area jobs. It also costs a lot of
money to build out a data center and get all the infrastructure in place to
support it, and that money gets spent (idealistically) on local contractors.

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.

------
doh
Great. If they figure out the ordering system, it could be interesting. Last
time (3 months ago) to install 200 servers (that they claim to have up in
120sec) would take 9 weeks, even if with our long term commitment.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
If you're installing 200 servers that's not a dedicated order. That's a
colocation. Why on earth would you order 200 from OVH? That's what, 4 whole
cabinets if you squeeze? Do people really order whole cabinets through a sales
system clearly designed for 1U to 3U at a time? You really expected four cabs
in 9 weeks with no involvement on your part?

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.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Why on earth would you order 200 from OVH?

You don't know what you don't know.

~~~
tmikaeld
OVH treats VIP customers very differently than its one-cheap-box-hire
customers.

EDIT: As suggested below by toomuchtodo, at this level of deployment - Colo
would be cheaper.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> So I really don't see any problem with 200 boxes from OVH.

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.

~~~
tmikaeld
I assumed that we where talking dedicated hardware here and not cloud.

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.

~~~
Veratyr
I think what he's saying is that 200 boxes from OVH is dedicated and that 200
boxes is well past the point where you should switch from dedicated to colo.

The cloud part was just an example of a tipping point and not the main point
of the comment.

~~~
tmikaeld
Ah, ok, well I don't have any experience with the accumulated costs at this
level of deployment.

------
jarnix
It may become difficult for OVH (based in France) to survive with Amazon and
Azure deploying servers in France, don't you think ?

~~~
dx034
I don't think so, they have a different type of clients. AWS is great if you
want to quickly deploy servers or get rid of most administration work.

If you can estimate the power you need and/or use a lot of bandwidth, OVH can
be much, much cheaper.

------
koksik202
Bit too late for this game as AWS is expanding constantly in both Americas

