Russia, The Final Frontier For Data Centers? | Hacker News Reader

Russia, The Final Frontier For Data Centers?

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12 pointscrocus23 comments

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%.

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

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.

wow...that's not even wrong

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

so put your data centers for American use in America, and for European/Japanese use in Russia. Duh?

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.

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.

>just decided to nationalize all of its oil industry

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

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.

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.

>Aside from my ability or non-ability to speak Russian

No one was questioning your ability to speak Russian. The issue in question was your awareness of the reality as it exists outside of the lens of the corporate media.

>I stand by my original comment until persuaded otherwise

That's your prerogative but as we've pointed out you are wrong and appear to be biased.

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?

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.

In this case, it would be a pretty safe bet. The oil industry was owned by even more sinister plutocrats before it was "nationalized" by the current ones. The reason you're hearing so much more about this now is that the current plutocrats are more into long-term strategy and less into dumping their stolen wealth and retiring in London as soon as possible. This is bad for certain Western interests, hence the "Putin is the Devil" stories you see in every other issue of The Economist.

In fact, investing in Russia paid off well for many Western companies, and the Russian government never got in the way (beyond its natural tendency to get in the way due to widespread petty corruption).

Well if you don't want to get into details that's a fine position to take. However if you always follow the crowd and never get into details yourself you will never win anything. There are nuances to Russian situation and if you figure them out while others don't you may have an advantage in certain areas. So here come nuances:

Energy industry is insanely profitable and was devoured by Putin's government. Telecom industry is also insanely profitable and was left alone. Why so?

For one, energy was originally privatized with violations (aka stolen) from the government in the 90s, whereas telecoms have mostly grown by themselves. Putin has actually offered oligarchs truce - they keep the money but return the companies back. Some agreed and live very well (Abramovich), others disagreed and are now in exile (Berezovski) or jail (Khodorkovski). Putin can be blamed for nailing them on taxes instead of original theft, but hardly anyone blames US for doing the same to Al Capone, right?

Second difference lies in nature of energy industry itself. Energy is a weapon as Putin has demonstrated us in his treatment of neighboring states. Telecom is not. So, don't hoard Putin's favorite weapon.

Then there are advantages to building DCs in Russia:

1) Energy is cheap there. At some point they actually brought aluminum ore from Africa to process in Russia and shipped it back, because energy was so cheap. Why is it cheap? Because of subsidies. EU is (was?) going nuts over it, but I don't think Putin budged. Energy subsidies are kind of important in cold climates.

2) Talent is plentiful.

3) Europe, China and Japan are close by

4) Real estate is cheap in the areas where you would typically build a DC compared to Europe or Japan.

You forgot to add, "Where the competitions is routinely "eliminated" by skilled snipers, or radiated posion". Wasn't last year that a profilic Forbes' editor got killed in Russia?

That's nothing. Last time a president got uppity in America he got killed, too. His name was JFK. No one is safe here, you see. THEY are out to get poor little hackers, big time, so run for you life. Make sure your HN account does not point anywhere they can find you.

Or maybe start calculating risks instead. Either one will do.

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