

Russia, The Final Frontier For Data Centers? - crocus
http://gigaom.com/2008/07/27/russia-data-centers/

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Alex3917
I still don't understand why more data centers don't just use lake source
cooling. With a relatively modest upfront investment these companies could
reduce the amount of electricity they use for cooling by 90%.

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asdflkj
Probably because energy used for cooling is only a fraction of total energy
used, so other considerations take precedence.

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henning
If my understanding of the commercial malware industry is accurate, operating
a data center in Russia would be great, until you're muscled into being a spam
operation by local organized crime.

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DenisM
That's only until black bears break in and steal all your vodka supply,
therefore neutralizing your sysadmins.

Dude, seriously. Russia is not Somalia or wild west.

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henning
No, it isn't. It's just a place where if you're a spam kingpin and you anger
the wrong people, you'll get whacked.

Congratulations to everyone disagreeing with me by downmodding. Stay classy.

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DenisM
They are totally out to get you. Putin wants to nationalize your startup,
Russian mob wants to force you into spam slavery (and will kill you if you
don't do good job) and HN particpants want to silence you.

Or maybe you are blowing it out of proportion. Either one.

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bprater
How does latency affect users in other countries? Worth worrying about?

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ruslan
It's a wide-spread myth that the weather is cold in Siberia. I do live in
Tyumen (West Siberia) and it's +32C here now. So, you cannot save on
aircooling.

The two more myths are, that wild bears are all leaning around over here and
one can drill oil right in his backyard.

There are no problems with BW, as for the past 8 years Transtelecom and
Rostelecom -- both nationwide telcos, deployed a number of transcontinental
fiber cables all along the TransSib (the rail-road connecting farthest east
and west points of Russia). On both ends they are peering to EU and to
Japan/China/Korea.

The average ping from Tyumen to my servers co-located in Mountain View is
180-200ms and the most part of it constitutes by european backbones.

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tx
200ms is very slow. I wouldn't put my business on anything slower than 100ms,
I manage servers at three different US data centers and ping is within
50..70ms range for all of them, including cheap slicehost.

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osipov
according to the article, building a data center in russia seems to make sense
when optimizing for 1) flops per dollar of watt-hour 2) high absolute value of
flops. for example, google may be interested in shifting their compute/flops
intensive tasks (e.g. building search index) to the servers in russia and then
replicating the index globally.

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DanielBMarkham
Would you really drop several hundred million in investment in a country that
just decided to nationalize all of its oil industry? A country with a history
of nationalizing things so that the rich plutocrats keep geting richer?

Maybe Microsoft, but not me.

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osipov
>just decided to nationalize all of its oil industry

that's false. do you by any chance get your news from the Anglophone media?

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tx
His nick implies, at least statistically speaking, that he lives in a
informational isolation and has no access to news, unless he knows more than
one language [and uses it].

For English speakers the only source of information about international
affairs, IMO, is books: Internet and TV are useless. For Daniel I'd recommend
"Bad Money" by Kevin Phillips.

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DanielBMarkham
Aside from my ability or non-ability to speak Russian, I'm curious as to how
my nick would imply that I "live in a [sic] informational isolation and has no
access to news..."

I'm also looking forward to a book that Amazon touts "In Bad Money, Phillips
describes the consequences of our misguided economic policies, our mounting
debt, our collapsing housing market, our threatened oil, and the end of
American domination of world markets. America’s current challenges (and
failures) run striking parallels to the decline of previous leading world
economic powers—especially the Dutch and British. Global overreach, worn-out
politics, excessive debt, and exhausted energy regimes are all chilling
signals that the United States is crumbling as the world superpower."

Gee. Must be quite the fun guy to run into at parties.

I'm not going to get into Russian corruption and associated risk involved with
investing there. I'll let the world markets make those calls. I stand by my
original comment until persuaded otherwise, and statistical analysis of my
nick ain't cutting the mustard, gentlemen.

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tx
Daniel, the stories regarding Russian corruption are greatly exaggerated in US
media [which, of course, doesn't mean there isn't any]. The book by Phillips
explains why: this isn't about anti-Russian/anti-American politics, there are
real and valid business reasons behind this.

Also, do not dismiss Phillips as "one of those" authors. Far from it.

Following your logic we shouldn't be building factories in China (because
they're commies) and we shouldn't be investing in Iraq (because they're crazy
Muslims).

American economy, and the super-power status that comes with it, had been
built on two things: exploration of oil as a new energy medium and devastating
world wars in Europe that crippled competitors, namely UK. But we aren't #1
oil producer anymore, soon we won't be #2 as well, meanwhile the world oil
production has stopped growing 2 years ago, thus we need something else.

We've tried at least one "new thing", look at our attempt to become the center
of world's finance, but failed. Why not become the global dominating power at
computation and information processing? Why not take advantage of American
universities, cheap Russian electricity, whatever it takes, to find something,
besides oil and finance, to power US economy for years to come?

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Caligula
Rather than responding with a request to read a book, you provide an answer
based on it?

Russia nationalized Yukos. The argument that the prices were too low are
silly. It was over a decade ago when resources in the former USSR were priced
low. Things like this happen after governments fall.

Daniel was just saying that there was an element of risk that makes investors
afraid when countries nationalize sectors of their economies.

