(HILLSBORO, OR) - - Data centers are really in the business of selling electricity. Think of them as a large charging brick with lots of outputs.
On Feb. 25, NTT Global Data Centers opened part one of a planned five data center campus on 47 acres in Hillsboro. The first space is a retrofit of the SunPower solar panel factory, but the next four will be new construction.
The companies that need data centers — everyone from the tech giants like Amazon and Intel to mid-sized companies that have outsourced their computing needs to the cloud — need stable power. No spikes, and certainly no interruptions.
Service providers offer the nines of availability, meaning the percentage of time that the network will be up and running. Seven nines or 99.99999% of uptime is better than five nines or 99.999%. (Those annual downtimes would be 3.15 seconds and 5.26 minutes, respectively.)
As well as electricity, a data center provides staff on-site to keep the heating and cooling systems running and fix things. The UPS typically looks like a truck container. It smooths out the power supply and contains a giant battery for five minutes of power back-up while the UPS instructs the diesel generators to kick in.
Undersea Cables
Bruno Berti, vice president of Product Management, told the Business Tribune that Hillsboro was selected for its reliable and moderately priced power. Like Los Angeles, Hillsboro is also one of only two places, or landing stations, where transatlantic data cables come ashore in the United States from Asia. (There are approximately 406 submarine cables in service around the world. One of them comes straight to Oregon and lands in Hillsboro. From here, it is split up and runs up and down the coast bringing data to the west.)
According to NTT, cloud services, content, games, and mobile device communications drive 95% of global internet traffic through subsea cables. Demand is only growing as more people turn to web browsing, e-commerce, online gaming, and streaming video.
Berti explained that the global pandemic increased the demand for bandwidth.
"Increases in people working from home, distance learning, e-medicine, video streaming, online shopping and gaming are creating unprecedented data demands," he said. Hillsboro also has no sales tax and an Enterprise Zone Program property tax abatement to new data centers for up to five years.
Meet in the Lobby
Information technology infrastructure has changed at work due to the convergence of computers, storage, and networking. Many companies no longer own computers, instead choosing to rent computing power by the second from data centers and storing files.
NTT provides 10,000 square feet of office space where companies can base their tech workers with access to the servers. The company also offers live, in-house tech support if a remote company needs someone to physically change out a configuration without sending their staff. There's also hoteling space, conference rooms, and break rooms.
Berti said what they do is provide a "hotel" for tech infrastructure. "We provide space for the company's infrastructures. We provide power to make sure their equipment servers network the appropriate power in an uninterruptible fashion. We provide cooling because those computers and equipment get hot. We provide physical security around the environment, and connectivity for the clients."
Companies might choose the public cloud, as provided by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, or build their own in data centers. (NTT offers a consulting service that will do that part too, "soup to nuts," as Berti puts it.)
Clouds Continue
"(We'll) put all their equipment, all their servers, all of their applications into a nice package, and put it in one of our data centers. So, although it's a private cloud, it actually is housed in one of our data centers. Some of those companies put some of their applications in a public cloud like Amazon, but they'll also put some of their other applications or maybe their financial system, they'll keep them in a data center themselves and manage that themselves, a hybrid environment."
He likes going into a data center and seeing all the lights flashing.
"It's not just a big box that sucks a lot of power. It's actually providing photos for families, retail for businesses…Uber and those types of companies use data centers to not only manage where the drivers go, but also take orders and do a lot of the interaction that happens."
Hillsboro is a data center-friendly place. Some clients were looking for alternatives to California and Virginia. (Northern Virginia has by far the greatest concentration of data centers in the US.)
NTT also likes Washington County's green power options — the promise from PGE that windmills and hydro plants made the electricity.
"From a cost perspective, it's pennies on the per kilowatt-hour," Berti says. Oregonian businesses usually pay less than a dime. During the Texas power outage in February 2021, some customers were billed at $9 a kilowatt-hour, up from the usual 12 cents.
Fortnite or Teams?
As online gaming and movie streaming has burgeoned, data centers have become less centralized. Ping speed is everything to series online games, and moving centers physically closer to the big cities save milliseconds, even when data travels at the speed of light.
"Some of these gaming companies have distributed their servers across multiple data centers. The ones that are latency dependent, and ping specific, they'll have some in Hillsboro, they'll have some in Los Angeles, they'll have some in Santa Clara, they'll have some in Chicago, instead of just one data center."
Now Hiring
"We sell electricity, basically megawatts of capacity. The conditioned power, the cooling, the security, and the connectivity around that."
NTT is hiring locally for physical security, that is, guards and staff responsible for everything that happens on the campus. Second, critical facilities technicians tend to the mechanical and electrical infrastructure, including the cooling and power systems. And third, trained Information Technology professionals to help customers with their environments called remote hands and eyes. Most of the jobs are college or community college graduate level.
NTT launched two data
centers in the U.S. this week, each capable of supporting 36 megawatts of IT
load, the energy consumed by servers. One is in Hillsboro, the other in
Chicago, Illinois. According to trade magazine DataCenter Dynamic, more are
planned for Silicon Valley and Ashburn later in 2021. When finished, the
Hillsboro NTT data centers will offer 126 MW of critical IT load. Global Data
Centers is a division of NTT Ltd. In the last six years, as part of its global
expansion policy, NTT has bought up DPA, e-shelter, Gyron, Netmagic, NTT
Indonesia Nexcenter, and RagingWire. It created a standardized product with
standardized pricing. It now has over 160 data centers spanning more than 20
countries and is spending about $7 billion in the next five years to expand
that portfolio.
