OVH to establish North American headquarters and first U.S. data center (opens in new tab)

Probably because they're aiming to provide a private government cloud and they want to be geographically closer to key clients - Fauquier county is a 20 min drive from DC and big co's in West Virginia. Also because the incentives Virginia is providing ($1.25m in cash, cuts on sales and use tax, cash for employee training) make up for a higher energy cost - especially the tax cuts.

It's also on a major trunk which helps considerably with connectivity, and ping times from there to the east coast of the US are comparable to Chicago.

That cheap power is another reason why Québec is a big manufacturer of aluminum which is an extremely energy intensive process.

Because I used to live there and know the electric company was, prior to being acquired by a bigger one, well run by engineers (a good idea if you have nukes...), I expected their power rates at (eventual) massive data-center scales to be good.

While I'm not sure I believe the "We're Great!" first thing I found with Google indicating the possibility of a rate even lower by a few tenths of a cent, it looks good ... except of course per Google the exchange rate is running 1-0.75. Still, their power should be pretty affordable, I'd more worry about tradeoffs in more expensive real estate vs. easier hiring of talent and the other advantages of being in a major telecom metro area.

And their are other advantages as noted by others in this sub-thread, and doesn't AWS have its biggest region in NoVA?

An Oregon datacenter was also announced this year: http://mj.ovh.com/nl2/4tpt/xsvw.html

Rate seems about right. Their datacenter is located near the Beauharnois power station. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauharnois_Hydroelectric_Gene...

I also stumbled upon an article that said it was (at the time, in 2012) the largest data center in the world. That doesn't sound right.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I believe this is due to them being a French entity and the French laws or banking systems requiring this. But I could be wrong, I'm basing it on the fact that Gandi had the same thing unit they created a US Entity which could do the billing. I'm guessing this is not far away for OVH either now.

They do have automatic recurring billing for the Public Cloud servers now, but on the dedicated servers it is still the old payment system for some reason.

Based on a Microsoft ruling, I believe only their US data center. As always, take measures to keep your data out of the US if it's important to you.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/business/dealbook/micro...

They made a good post addressing this.

https://www.ovh.co.uk/news/articles/a2294.how-ovh-expand-in-...

Speaking of: are the non-US AWS regions subject to warrantless searches? Or are they technically their own "companies"?

I'm definitely questioning this decision because I believe a lot of their business comes from people doing some pretty questionable things with copyright. Might open up some of the larger video hosts that work with them to the scrutiny of US authorities.

I wouldn't worry about a personal seed box, but some pretty big video hosts work with them closely.

Yeah, I guess this means that their plans to build a data center in New York in 2016 fell through. [1] I love OVH, but I've been waiting for a while for a second data center in North America. I hope they build this one.

[1] https://www.ovh.com/us/news/articles/a1806.new-york-scouting...

I agree, using dedicated hardware is certainly nice and has some advantages over VMs. It's not only a big thing in the future but also at present, companies like OVH or Hetzner seem to do well despite the rising of the "Cloud".

You exactly know what you get performance wise, e.g. no bad influence from some random neighboring VM. Security is also a concern with virtualization, isolation between VMs turned out to be not that perfect as desired. You can also roll your own virtualization exactly tailored to your needs. "Cloud" VMs also tend to be rather expensive if you need them continuously, you pay for the flexibility they provide.

It should be a big thing, but their marketing/hype machine is seriously lacking. As a first step, building a data center presence in SV/west coast would help.

And these dedi boxes (also from OVH) are priced almost unbelievably low: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml

Good question. I don't think it has that much of an effect, as none of the above compete with businesses like OVH on price at all.

Companies like OVH that sell low priced are basically real estate investors (and, in fact, a number of real estate investment firms are large data centre owners) with various degrees of value-adds, but where the way to grow your profit margins is to identify lower priced property and cheap power relative to your competition and wait for your capital investment to appreciate.

AWS/Azure/GCE on the other hand are tech play where they are getting their huge margins on value adds or perceived value adds and are much less directly affected

I'm not sure what the average salaries look like for data center employees, but assuming a reasonable, round figure of $50k/year, that's about $2.7mm/year in additional area income. Which has a multiplicative effect as it gets spent in the local economy and supports other area jobs. It also costs a lot of money to build out a data center and get all the infrastructure in place to support it, and that money gets spent (idealistically) on local contractors.

Plus, once the area infrastructure, local zoning/regulations, and talent pool gets built out to support this type of project, it becomes a lot more attractive for other companies to bring similar projects.

Tax exemptions to attract business can get real shady and dubious, but it's not just the permanent, direct jobs you have to factor in. The potential positive externalities in this case seem like a solid case for tax exemptions. And the grant helps absorb some of the cost of getting local infrastructure in place that'll be needed to support it; infrastructure that'll benefit more than just OVH.

If you're installing 200 servers that's not a dedicated order. That's a colocation. Why on earth would you order 200 from OVH? That's what, 4 whole cabinets if you squeeze? Do people really order whole cabinets through a sales system clearly designed for 1U to 3U at a time? You really expected four cabs in 9 weeks with no involvement on your part?

Of course they need 9 weeks and that's actually pretty good, considering what my procurement timetables look like for facilities my company owns. Shit, I can't even get 52U to the loading dock in 9 weeks.

That's more in line for colocation than just a hosted solution. They probably don't have that much hardware laying around that's unused.

Their ordering system isn't the biggest hassle. It's their billing system that's absurd.

I don't think so, they have a different type of clients. AWS is great if you want to quickly deploy servers or get rid of most administration work.

If you can estimate the power you need and/or use a lot of bandwidth, OVH can be much, much cheaper.

As a french guy, Azure is pretty much unknown here (except for MS shops, i guess) and Amazon is already used by startups. The difference between Amazon datacenters in France instead of Ireland / Germany will not change a thing.