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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

>> "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?

Data Centers are great for the tax base, multi-million dollar businesses that bring in loads of tax revenue, but not lots of people, which reduces infrastructure costs. The additional tax dollars thus goes out to hire people, etc. etc.

Virginia is on a huge high-tech growth track due to the increased tech thrust in the Fed Gov space. The state is even reviving towns with tax benefits for computing centers in remote parts.

While this isn't along the famed "Tech Corridor" in Virginia, it could be the beginning of a "Tech Triangle" that could quickly grow to a second place tech hub to SV.

While this isn't in Ashburn, it's between Gainesville and Warrenton at a site that was formerly an NSA signals intelligence facility [1] and is now a fledgling industrial park that this just-outside-of-exurban-DC county is trying to push. It's adjacent to major FAA air traffic control facility.

That being said, I wouldn't count this as "new node" in the Tech Corridor, it's simply a good site in a lower-tax neighboring county, but still in DC's exurban western periphery. When other parts of Virginia away from a 20-mile radius of Dulles are seeing this kind of investment, then we can talk about a Virginia Tech Triangle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Hill_Farms_Station

> formerly an NSA signals intelligence facility

Hey, EU customers who want a POP in the US -- come use our new servers! We checked, definitely no SIGINT bugs left behind. :)

That you're aware of. :)

Vint Hill. Figures. That was vacant. There are already so many data centers near Langley and Liberty Crossing that it's embarrassing.

The place where I colocate our servers (the company is probably in the top five in the industry in terms of size, with data centers in about a dozen cities) runs with a tech staff of ~six during the day and two overnight. They've obviously got other staff for all of the other business-related roles, but data centers just don't require a lot of staff in the general case.

That's pretty typical. You need maybe a couple of technicians to run the water and air handling systems, a handful of people on skateboards swapping out dead machines, and some security guards.

Here's a recent article that says Google employees 400 people in their Oklahoma facility, which is enormous.

http://www.tulsaworld.com/businesshomepage1/new-google-facil...

not really, no, a large scale datacenter operator does as much as possible to reduce the number of people involved. Ideally the only staff you need on site are relatively low wage, low skilled persons who know how to rack a server, connect a power cable, connect some network cables according to a master plan. Everything else happens through automated provisioning software and neteng/sysadmin staff who work off site, could be anywhere in the world.

I am actually surprised it is as high as 54, if you visit some of the really huge datacenters in Quincy, WA or The Dalles, OR you might walk through the entire facility and see 3 people working on a "busy" day.

They are staffed 24x7 and have numerous shifts, so keeping three people in a building on that schedule means a staff of at least 12-18.

Plus security guards, probably another 3-4. With 24/7 shifts, you quickly get to 60 people.

Two people around the clock with no provision for vacation or absence is a minimum of 10 people (if you keep all shifts 40h and below.) Add a couple for redundancy, some sort of manager, cleaning staff and a surge of day time staff and you're at 20. You can probably use a few more people, some tradespersons, and security (this is near DC, they have to be thinking about Gov work) and pretty soon 54 is not too crazy.

OVH provides lots of leased servers so you need larger staff than a pure colo. They're also calling this US HQ so add some sales, support and operations staff that would/will be remote at the second US datacenter.

Apple and Facebook are both establishing datacenters in Denmark. For the Facebook one they estimate 1.200 jobs building it, and 1.000 new jobs both working there and around the datacenter.

I think they are going to be very disappointed if that is the amount of jobs they expect.

There is some interesting information from Facebooks datacenter in Oregon from 2011 here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/prineville-data-center/press-...

> Over the course of the project, more than 1,300 people have worked on the site – an average of 250 workers a day. When completed, Facebook has committed to hire 35 full-time employees to run and maintain the data center.

As per the 1k jobs, sometimes those numbers are calculated based on how many new jobs can the local government (directly or not) create with the tax surplus they'll be getting from the new business coming into town.

In the same way that some companies have negative externalities like pollution, you could think of a data-centre more as having a positive externality of job creation.

Data-centers don't do many things themselves, using manual labor; instead, they're just large machines that consume purified resources (power, live fiber, provisioned equipment) and turn it into APIs. But purifying those resources for the DC's consumption does require people—and DCs need a lot of each of the resources they consume. For every N data-centres that get built in a state, that state probably employs a good few more power-plant workers and linemen, for just one effect.

Not really. That infrastructure scales up. You pick up a few construction jobs and maybe get some reusable utility infrastructure. That's it.

A lot of the other roles are field service type things that don't use local workers.

That's not a bad thing, just not the end-all, be-all. if the building of data centers or similar facilities are a trend, you will build up good local capability to build these facilities and may start winning other business.

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.

It's good PR to bring more tech companies; it signals there's a talent pool in the area, because high tech companies are established there.

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

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

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.

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.

This amount of job growth seems typical at first blush. A haphazard sampling [1] of job creation announcements in Virginia as a result of state grants reveals:

April 2013: 25 jobs in secure document and card printing

March 2014: 40 jobs in new lumber mill

August 2014: 25 jobs in manufacturing coating spray for aircraft turbine parts

August 2014: 25 jobs in new lumber mill

August 2014: 500 jobs in parts for automotive engines

October 2014: 75 new jobs in parts of automatic transmissions

December 2014: 97 new jobs in HQ consolidation for medical device company

April 2015: 160 new jobs in food processing for fruits

May 2015: 100 jobs in lighting fixture manufacturing

January 2016: 50 jobs in tamper-evident label manufacturing

February 2016: 50 jobs in ingredients for cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries

March 2016: 15 jobs in new lumber mill

March 2016: 1800 new jobs in client support and consulting

September 2016: 50 jobs in paper towel manufacturing

[1] http://www.virginiabusiness.com/search/google?q=jobs+grant

Latest unemployment figures for VA show a 3.9% unemployment rate with 152,545 unemployed in the state.

You see similar things with manufacturing coming back to the US. Plenty of SKUs, not many jobs. This is because it's the most easily automated SKUs that get brought back to the US.

i'll speak to what i know -- an equinix datacenter probably employs about 20 people, most of them security staff.

most of the people who work on the actual facility are vendor staff, i.e. hvac specialists, power system specialists, the people from caterpillar that maintain the diesel gens, etc. for that matter, even security is outsourced (but they are still full time @ the facility).

everyone else is a customer, coming in and out to do internet-y things in the cloud aka working on computers in datacenters, same as it ever was.

OVH does mostly dedicated server so they may find it economical to have slightly more operations staff. The job count also includes the US HQ so sales/management type positions.

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