Amazon.com data center Boardman, OR in local news

November 24, 2009 Dave Ohara

Leave it to the local news to publish a video of Amazon.com’s data center in Boardman, OR.

Story Published: Nov 10, 2008 at 6:13 PM PST

By Molly Kelleher

Video

BOARDMAN - First an Amazon.com call center in came to Kennewick and now a data center is planned in Boardman.
Amazon is tapping into the Columbia Basin once again.
Back out in the corn fields, on a dirt road, a building is taking shape.
The Port of Morrow isn't allowed to say who's moving in to this 60 acre spot, but they can tell us a data center is being built out here in Boardman.
Oregon newspapers say, it's Amazon.com.

The news video is embedded below.

What I found interesting is how lean Amazon is in its data center construction and employment numbers.

The data center will bring in up to 200 construction jobs and once it's up and running, 20 people will work here full time.
And that's only phase one, there's also talks to adding two more centers just like this one.

WHIR says.

If all goes as planned, the $100-million site project will be completed in the third quarter of 2010, says Port of Morrow general manager Gary Neal.

The TV station recently shot footage of the Amazon site at the Port of Morrow, a 9,000-acre industrial park along the Columbia River that's about 160 miles east of Portland.

The 116,700-square-foot building is to be constructed over six phases, with two data centers to follow.

Here is a low res picture of the industrial park.

Amazon announces Singapore Data Center expansion for AWS hosting in Asia

November 13, 2009 Dave Ohara

Here is Amazon’s announcement of data center expansion in AWS.

Amazon Web Services Announces Expansion into Asia in the First Half of 2010

New Asia-Based AWS Infrastructure Will Enable Businesses to Run Applications, Store and Process Data, and Better Serve Their End-Users Located in Asia

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2009-- Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced an expansion of its services into an Asia-Pacific region in the first half of 2010, enabling businesses to deploy compute and storage resources in close proximity to their end-users in the region. Software developers and businesses will be able to access AWS’s infrastructure services from multiple Availability Zones in Singapore in the first half of 2010, then in other Availability Zones within Asia over the second half of 2010. AWS services available at the launch of the Asia-Pacific region will include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and Amazon CloudFront. To get started using Amazon Web Services, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

“Developers and businesses located in Asia, as well as those with a multi-national presence, have been eager for Asia-based infrastructure to minimize latency and optimize performance,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Amazon Web Services. “We’re very excited to announce the expansion of AWS infrastructure into Asia to help our customers plan their technology investments and better serve their end-users in Asia.”

Pricing for Amazon Web Services in Asia will be announced when the services launch next year.

Amazon recently announced European hosting of AWS, and now Asia. As quiet as Amazon is about its data centers, they need to give in to the market pressures to know where AWS is hosted.

Amazon and Google Rule The Cloud, says Study

October 6, 2009 Dave Ohara

As if we needed a study to tell us Amazon and Google rule cloud services. Well, I guess someone didn’t know as they paid for research. news.com has the post.

Study: Amazon and Google rule the cloud

by Dave Rosenberg

If recent research is any indication, Amazon.com and Google are winning the cloud game.

Evans Data on Tuesday released a report (registration required) on how developers perceive cloud service providers related to cloud services offerings, including their completeness and the companies' ability to execute on the vision.

Janel Garvin, the founder of Evans Data and the author of the report, provides excellent insight into the current state of the market and how quickly things could change, if certain large vendors (notably AT&T and Microsoft) got their acts together more quickly.

Given their robust services, it isn't surprising that Amazon and Google top the list. And although IBM, VMware, and Microsoft trail, each offers important components of cloud infrastructure.

Cloud leaders

(Credit: Screenshot by Dave Rosenberg/CNET

An interesting perspective in the article.

Google got the top nod from developers for scalability, reliability, uptime, and best value, and Garvin states that Google "shows more strength in both perceived capabilities and perceived ability to execute, and the adoption patterns for Google are stronger, going into the future." However, Google's offering via AppEngine is nowhere near as robust as Amazon's Web Services capabilities.

The big vendor that continues to be late to the cloud game is Microsoft, which, despite an army of developers interested in Azure and other cloud services, has yet to offer a production-ready product. Says Garvin:

The two companies that truly straddle the cloud worlds, AT&T and Microsoft, both have excellent potential: through existing physical infrastructure in the case of AT&T or as in the case of Microsoft, by virtue of a prodigious developer network and well-known software capabilities. But, both are late to the party. And, in a market that's evolving as quickly as this one, that's a significant handicap.

Amazon adds more web services to Europe – SimpleDB, Cloudwatch, Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling

September 30, 2009 Dave Ohara

Sept 22, 2009 Amazon announced additional Amazon Web Services available in Europe.

Now In Europe: Amazon SimpleDB, CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing

I'm happy to announce that the following AWS services are now available in Europe:

Amazon SimpleDB - Highly available and scalable, low/no administration structured data storage.

Amazon CloudWatch - Monitoring for the AWS cloud, starting with providing resource consumption (CPU utilization, network traffic, and disk I/O) for EC2 instances.

Elastic Load Balancing - Traffic distribution across multiple EC2 instances.

Auto Scaling - Automated scaling of EC2 instances based on rules that you define.

All of the services work just the same way in Europe as they do in the US. Existing applications and management tools should be able to access the services in this region after a simple change of the service endpoint. As is the case with S3 andEC2, these services are independent of their US counterparts.

Our full slate of infrastructure services is now available in Europe. With the European debut of these services, developers can now built reliable and scalable applications in both of the AWS regions (US and Europe).

-- Jeff;

Move to Cloud Computing, Saves 80% Operating Cost

April 11, 2009 Dave Ohara

Here is a blog entry about a guy who thinks about green a lot and discusses his move to Amazon Web Services’s EC2. He discusses servers, green data centers, and how he saves 80% of his operating cost by moving to the cloud.

Cloud Computing: Truly Green Data Centers

Category: Conservation, Save Electricity, Technology – Tom Harrison – 10:54 am

There has been a lot written about how much power is consumed by the computers that drive the Internet. A lot has been written about “green” data centers. But I think there’s a far more significant trend when, combined with more efficient computers and data centers, will make a 10x or greater reduction in power demand possible: cloud computing.

Data centers, brown or green are huge buildings — they are truly incredible places, with thousands of computers owned by multiple companies. I have negotiated the contracts for “co-location” in a number of data centers: you pay for floor space, bandwidth, and power and get a facility that has great connectivity, power that never goes out, and a carefully cooled environment for the computers. This blog, and most other websites are located at such data centers. Little sites like this one share a “slice” of a server with a number of others. Large sites like the ones we have at the Internet companies I have worked at have our own computers and other equipment “co-located” in data-centers.

Here is his bottom line.

The Virtual Green Cloud is Here

So look at cloud computing from an overall energy standpoint — we use about 80% less server power, thus need that much less cooling and that many fewer computers. Add virtualization and we use even fewer physical resources so the “embedded energy” of the hardware is even less.

The only losers in this whole new paradigm: the data centers (at least the ones who haven’t gone to cloud computing on their own) and the computer manufacturers.

Solar panels on the roof, more efficient cooling, and other “green data center” features are great improvements. But by enabling us to stop wasting power and resources our business, which is just one of many thousands like it, will save money and be green in a cloud computing environment.