Michael is DDJ's editor-at-large. He can be contacted at [email protected].
IN THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE DALLES on the northern border of Oregon, something big is happening. Up to now, the main claim to fame of this sleepy hamlet on the Columbia River was being, at least prior to 1846, the western terminus of the Oregon Trail. But now it's attracting national media attention because of a development described by one city official as "like a UFO landing in Mayberry."
The Dalles is getting Googled.
The Price of Power
Google is building in a giant industrial park in The Dalles what may be the world's largest server farm. The town's appeal as a server farm site seems to include cheap land, cheap housing, cheap labor, natural beauty, accomodating government officials, and a curiously good communication infrastructure (big-time high-speed fiber). But those virtues can be found elsewhere. Why The Dalles specifically? Chiefly, it's about the price of power.
CNET's Daniel Terdiman read about Google's The Dalles server farm in the New York Times and immediately tried to get into the place. He wasn't allowed in the secretive site, but the main impression he gleaned from his unproductive visit was one of power consumption—massive cooling systems visible from miles away and deafeningly loud up close. And the facility wasn't even finished yet. As Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has pointed out on his blog, power demands of servers are becoming a huge issue. Google likes to roll its own servers, but if Sun gets an RFQ from Google tomorrow for a bunch of servers, it would probably be the power consumption issue that tipped the balance.
Computer users may worry about gigabytes and megaHertz, but Google is increasingly focused on kilowatts. The Dalles sits next to a 1.8 gigawatt dam on the largest hydroelectric power-producing river in the United States. As a result, the price of power in The Dalles is something like a quarter of what it is in Mountain View.
Google is not the only company capitalizing on the cheap power from Columbia River dams: Microsoft and Yahoo are building server farms in Quincy, Washington, farther upriver near Grand Coulee.
That they are all doing this gives some clue to how these three companies see their future. And it's nice to have some clues, because whether you're working in a three-person startup building an e-commerce app for some vertical market or tapping into open-source tools on the Web to aid your in-house programming at a Fortune 500 company, where these three companies are headed will affect you.
