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Choosing the right physical location for a data center is a critical step in building highly available services, requiring evaluation of natural disaster risk, power availability, climate, connectivity, and workforce access.

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About this video

Selecting a data center location is one of the foundational decisions in designing highly available infrastructure, and getting it wrong can introduce chronic downtime that end users have no tolerance for. Geographic regions prone to hurricanes, tornadoes, or earthquakes pose obvious risks not only to physical facilities but also to the power lines, fiber routes, and other external services that data centers depend on. Even a well-hardened facility can suffer outages when the surrounding infrastructure is compromised by a major weather event or seismic activity. For this reason, natural disaster frequency and severity must be assessed before any other site criteria. Once the risk profile of a region is understood, several infrastructure factors come into focus. Power availability and cost are critical, since modern data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity and cooling. A location with cheap, abundant power — such as areas served by hydroelectric generation — offers a significant operational advantage. High-speed, redundant internet connectivity is equally essential, as is a moderate climate that reduces the energy burden of cooling densely packed server hardware. Areas with extreme heat, like desert regions, drive up cooling costs substantially and can create thermal management challenges. Availability of qualified technical staff rounds out the site selection criteria, since even the most advanced facility requires skilled personnel to operate and maintain it. Regions that offer favorable conditions across all these dimensions, such as the inland areas of the Pacific Northwest in the United States, have become magnets for major cloud providers precisely because they address disaster risk, power cost, connectivity, climate, and workforce access in a single location.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Data Center Location Selection

Key terms

High Availability
HA
High Availability describes systems designed to operate continuously with minimal downtime, achieved through redundancy, failover clustering, and load balancing to meet the Availability pillar of the CIA triad.
Data Center
A facility that houses computing infrastructure such as servers, storage, and networking equipment used to deliver IT services.
Redundancy
The duplication of critical components or systems to increase reliability and availability.
Disaster Recovery
DR
The process and procedures for recovering IT systems and data following a disruptive event.
Availability
The assurance that systems and data are accessible and operational when needed by authorized users.
Failover
The automatic switching to a redundant system or component when the primary one fails.

Topics

Data Center Site Selection High Availability Disaster Risk Power Infrastructure Physical Infrastructure

Transcript

Choosing Where to Host

To create highly available services, one of the first things that I need to choose is where am I going to locate those services? Where am I going to host things out of?

For instance, if I choose a location that's prone to a lot of tornadoes or hurricanes, where there are a lot of natural disasters, then that's going to be problematic. That's going to bring my services down. And somebody who lives in another part of the country isn't going to understand that I'm operating out of a place that has a lot of downtime to it. They don't really care about that. So I need to choose the proper location.

Areas Prone to Disasters

There are certain areas that are more prone to disasters. A good example is this area here by the United States that is prone to a lot of hurricanes and causes a lot of damage. Same thing with the middle of the US: there are a lot of tornadoes in that area, and it causes a lot of damage — and not just damage to maybe our data center. We can make a robust data center that could withstand these different elements, but there are also services coming into those data centers that can cause problems as well.

Considerations

Here are some considerations when we're setting up our services and our data center.

  • Natural disasters in the area. Can things be damaged in that area? Are they prone to earthquakes? Are they prone to these hurricanes?
  • The availability of power. How much abundance of power is there, and how expensive is that power?
  • The availability of high-speed internet, making sure I have connectivity to those services.
  • Climate. It actually takes a lot of power to cool down our infrastructure, so is it in a location that is extremely hot? I probably don't want to set up a data center in Death Valley, which is one of the hottest places on the earth, so that could be problematic.
  • The availability of employees.

An Example Region

I know there are a lot of data centers in my area, and where I live is in this region right here of the United States. Now, there are a lot of earthquakes that can happen on the coast, so the data centers aren't located really near the coast because there's a problem with earthquakes. But inland a little ways, it's not as much of a threat.

There's also abundance of power. We have a lot of dams on the Columbia River that generate power, so we have some of the cheapest power that's available out there. Another thing that we have available to us is high-speed internet around these areas. So it creates a lot of great connectivity and a lot of compelling reasons to put data centers here, which is why you see data centers from Amazon Web Services, from Google, from a lot of other industries set up their data centers here.

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