Some articles have been written recently about where the best location for running and building a datacenter is. These reports always pick mid-western states as the ideal locations due to cost. South Dakota or Kansas is a great place to build a cheap datacenter if cost is the number one concern. Labor is cheap, material costs are low, electricity prices are low. But these reports always leave out something that is very important. PEOPLE.
Datacenter operations will always be central to locations with population density. East Coast corridor, Texas, California, and so on. The surrounding population will support the service. Who needs colocation or datacenter services in South Dakota? The only people who can benefit from this are those who do not need to touch their equipment or Fortune 500 firms who can afford to fly out their technicians to a remote site. What people don’t realize is most operations that use significant colocation resources (10U and up) need to touch their equipment on a regular basis. They can’t ship it off 1000 miles into the mid-west.
Furthermore, the reduced electricity costs (which is the most significant operational cost of a datacenter) is only temporary. In a few years electricity prices will start to even out. Its sort of an anomaly that is Nebraska you can get electricity at $0.03 per Kwh – that wont last long. Mid-west locations also do not have the immense diversified telecom and fiber infrastructure that is present in major cities. Besides, content users are located in the major cities – content providers and users should be close to each other.
