Comment by redcap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by redcap | Hacker News Reader

While this is a big deal for anyone hosting data in Japan, I question why it had to be in Tokyo.

The earthquake in March suggest that it might be prudent to have data retention in other areas of the country.

While Tokyo is a big city and that comes with pluses for access, it has the following minuses:

1. real estate is expensive relative to the rest of Japan.

2. summer is hot - why have data centers in Tokyo and not up in the mountains or up north where it's cooler?

3. the Greater Tokyo area is due for a major earthquake. In addition, there's historical data dating back centuries showing that a big quake in one area is followed by big quakes in other areas of the country (although fingers crossed that we don't see a 9.0 quake).

There has been a lot of press over the past few months about companies in Japan putting effort into backup facilities that aren't in the Tokyo area. After the quake in March there were blackouts and a reasonable amount of chaos - just imagine what it would be like if the Tokyo quake actually occurs.

All of Japan is prone to earthquakes. The latest one actually happened to the North, in a cooler area than Tokyo. That said, Tokyo isn't particularly hot for Japan. Sure Hokkaido and Tohoku are much cooler, but Tokyo is in the coolest half of Japan.

Ping is a lot more important than an eventual earthquake even in Japan. Especially considering that all of Japan is prone to earthquakes. If you go up North, the Kinki area (Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto) will be quite far away, and lines will have much less redundancy than in a highly populated area.

In short, making a decision based on a possible huge natural disaster in the Kanto area would be a massive knee-jerk reaction.

It looks like their IP is residential. This ISP even has 1gbps lines commercially available in Tokyo from what I understand. I wouldn't be shocked if just put up a rack in up in the ISPs datacenter to make use of the cheapest bandwidth rates. They probably calculated most of their bandwidth in Japan will be in this network and they have good US peering.

Since, one rack today can be stuffed with 90 servers each up to 20x more powerful than what was around in 2005, I doubt they really require more than 1 well configured rack for a long time. When the time comes to add a second rack they always have the option to place it in another Japanese city, if they don't decide to goto another Asian country instead.

Considering the above, I doubt the savings were worth moving out of Tokyo.

>Since, one rack today can be stuffed with 90 servers each up to 20x more powerful than what was around in 2005

90 servers in a rack? Do you mean VPS? if not please could you elaborate?

Using half depth motherboards a rack is able to support 90 servers. Some providers like OVH in Europe focus on only building such racks.

It's a data center.

You're not living in it.

Data centers are huge, hot, and expensive. Both how hot an area is and how prone to natural disasters it is drastically affect the price of the data center.

The parent post asks good questions. Why are the data centers in Tokyo rather than in 'x' where 'x' doesn't have said problems? My best guess is network connectivity.

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