Can someone tell me what is these data centres

cavan_man2021

What the heck is these data centres sucking the energy out of the country. What do they do ?

L1011

This website is hosted in a data centre. All the pictures/videos you see on Instagram/Tiktok/whatever are hosted in a data centre.

Anything and everything you do online requires servers and switches in data centres.

They are cheaper to run here than many other countries as the country is quite cold and it significantly reduces the need for air conditioning - which is one of the main costs. It also makes them more environmentally efficient here than elsewhere - unless we end up burning coal to produce their power!

Borzoi

The big ones enable the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google provide the services that they do. Other ones enable Spotify, YouTube etc etc.

Most DCs in this country are owned and operated by the big tech companies, which also not surprisingly have major offices here

cavan_man2021

Then they want us all to drive electric cars, what a joke this country is turning into. We are going down plughole!

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117955806#Comment_117955806

Eirgrids consumption predictions include the electric car switchover; and electrification of trains etc.

Melodeon

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117955776#Comment_117955776

Ireland is also socially, politically, geologically, and climactically very stable, as well as being the landing point for several trans-Atlantic data cables, all of which add up to being an attractive place for this sort of thing.

Creamy Goodness

Old - Cavan - man yells at cloud.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117955776#Comment_117955776

Exactly, our climate and geographical environment is absolutely perfect for Data Centres.

KeithTS

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117955806#Comment_117955806

Do you like posting on boards.ie, or other forums?

When was the last time you logged onto facebook, or watched a YouTube video, or bought something on Amazon or some other website?

These sorts of activities require infrastructure like data centers. It's very easy to complain about the high energy consumption but are you willing to change the way you live in order to reduce our dependence on them? Or are you OK with them existing, but just not in your back yard?

28064212

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117955806#Comment_117955806

Amazing. Nine minutes between not knowing what a data centre is, and being an expert on national energy policy. Education is truly a wondrous thing

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117955946#Comment_117955946

He must have done some searching in that big search engine in the sky - which is actually hosted in a data centre in Dublin.

The J Stands for Jay

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117955806#Comment_117955806

You don't seem to like electric cars

The J Stands for Jay

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117956050#Comment_117956050

Wait till someone tells him Google searches have a carbon footprint.

Clareman

Few things about data centers is that static electricity is their enemy, a static charge can wipe a lot of systems, with this in mind they all have to be fairly "clean air", not clean room level but fully air-conned, because it doesn't have to have the temperature changed it's a lot cheaper here than other countries but still a factor. They also need clean power, this means that the power has to be at a standard level, slight changes can wipe out a lot of tech, doesn't make a difference to a lot of systems but IT systems don't like browning, with this in mind power to these plants always go through UPS systems to keep them standard, think of filling a water tank with a hose before starting the tap, by having the tank inbetween the hose and tap means that the water flow will always be constant, bigger the tank the bigger the drop in water that can be allowed for.

Data centers are usually just big warehouses filled with server racks, the management/maintenance of the actual content of the servers could be done anywhere in the world so often the only jobs in the actual data centers are janitors or maybe people to swop out failed hardware, mightn't seem like much but considering these are 24/7 operations with 1,000s of systems this can take a lot of people to maintain.

salmocab

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117956256#Comment_117956256

Janitors is a bit of a push, they generally have electricians or mechanical guys on site 24/7 along with security. They’d all pretty much have techs on site mon-Friday too performing other works.

Clareman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117956762#Comment_117956762

True, true, I should have said maintenance workers rather than janitors. For a lot of data centers which are outsourced the onsite owners won't be allowed access to the actual servers just the hardware.

cavan_man2021

Ok I have read all the comments, what's in it for the government to have these here. There is always an end game. It's not like these DC are major employers in server filled warehouses.

Why don't they use them wind turbines? Near the coastline, them things nearly take off.

I personally hate electric cars. Many people share this feeling. They have taken the lead out of petrol and I don't feel that petrol cars are adding a great deal to the pollution of the world.

Getting back to DC , our government don't like charging for tax to these big techs, or Apple and their 13 billion tax bill.

I find it very baffling indeed. I could live without Amazon and Facebook, maybe keep Google, but I don't think our youngsters could survive with their smartie phones.

Beechwoodspark

All these date centres should be told either

pay a significant new green levy charge based on their size and energy footprint

or

pull the plug and close them down

they add nothing of value to ireland yet are sucking and draining our little country’s electricity resources

cavan_man2021

Yes I agree with them draining the country. What gets my goatie up watching that news on telly is Eamonn Ryan coming to work on his bike. He probably parked the big car around the corner and took the bike out of the boot to look good.

Jim_Hodge

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957542#Comment_117957542

So much there. I don't know where to begin to counter the wind up sufficiently.

salmocab

I too would like to complain about data centres whilst using the internet

Beechwoodspark

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957557#Comment_117957557

I know Eamon through mutual friends and I have to say sorry now that is an unfair comment.

he is a committed green and a very deep thinker on green politics

Jim_Hodge

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957568#Comment_117957568

Just a pity he doesn't live in the real world - some of his comments are beyond belief.

cavan_man2021

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957568#Comment_117957568

He is a yuppie that does care about the working people that can't afford a electric and all this carbon tax.

I find it quite bizarre how some cant conceive of the internet being an actual physical thing requiring bricks and mortar and energy.

Use Google - data centre, Amazon - data centre, boards - data centre, on line banking - data centre, any other thing you do online - data centre, phone network - data centre, Netflix - data centre. No matter what you can think of the data to support it is stored in a data centre, bar maybe a few small operations working off local servers.

Now you can argue that these centres should not be here, be they are needed somewhere, and they are more energy efficient here than in most other places in the world. And its not as if they get their energy for free.

cavan_man2021

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957619#Comment_117957619

I personally don't mind the data centres but why can't the use wind turbines

whisky_galore

They are for storing our strategic reserve of cat videos.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957551#Comment_117957551

They employ a lot of people in the construction industry. Without the constant demand for data centres I don't believe the construction industry would be booming the way it is.

D3V!L

I think they should just get rid of these power hungry data centres and put all the data in the cloud 🤔

🙄

eggy81

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957551#Comment_117957551

Great for the bit of auld electrical work though. Nice to be employed.

eggy81

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957568#Comment_117957568

We’ve seen him deep in meditation in the dail more than once.

KildareP

Our climate is well suited to these sort of datacentres - relatively cool (significantly reduced aircon requirements), our air is a good humidity level (too dry air means static which means dead electronics), we rarely suffer extremes in weather (tornadoes, flash floods, intense thunderstorms, blizzards, earthquakes) and as mentioned we are well connected between Europe and the USA.

The problem is we've allowed these datacentres to come online very quickly while simultaneously shutting down our turf, oil and coal plants in the name of going green with nothing stable to replace them, all the while moving to electrify transport and heating.

Wind and solar can only do so much and you cannot rely on it to be there at the required levels when you need it at any given moment so you need a predictable "baseload" that can ramp up quickly and predictably when you need it.

When push comes to shove, datacentres are high volume, stable, steady, 24/7 consumers of electricity, unlike houses and offices which use the vast majority of their daily electricity over a very short space of time then practically nothing for the remainder of the 24 hours. Thus, when grid shortages arise, Eirgrid and the electricity supply companies have far more to lose by cutting off datacentres as opposed to residential areas. So guess who is going to get cut?

Clareman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957631#Comment_117957631

They do use wind turbines, in so far as they are taking the electrify from the national grid which is in turn fed from the turbines (Electricity | Energy Statistics In Ireland | SEAI), they can't just pop a load of turbines onto the top of their buildings to generate their own heat for a number of reasons, first off being as you point out turbines are often near the coast where they don't impact anyone, take a drive past a few wind farms at some stage and imagine those being located near data centres which are normally next to urban areas. The other issue with them generating their own power is the quality of the feed, wind turbines are like dynamos on a bike, the faster you go the brighter the light and vice versa, this isn't suitable for a data centre which needs a consistent, clean power source, even the standard power supply isn't clean enough for a lot of the data centre so it'll go through a UPS first.

Outside of the actual data, the largest output from a data centre is heat, anyone using any kind of technology knows that they give off heat, now imagine thousands and thousands of servers, data centres are very smart in re-using this heat, often it is brought back into the building to keep it at a standard temperature or turned back into electricity in some kind of heat recovery system, but a lot of time the heat is just "lost", there are plans to feed this heat back to local residential buildings which in turn will reduce the need for energy from those premises but that means that the data centres need to be close to residential areas and there is a bit of a housing issue at the moment so it's not always feasible to build the data centres close to where people live.

In my opinion we're going to be in a constant power battle and as we look to move more and more things to electricity the more and more electricity we will need, for the past decade or so there has been a massive shift to electricity, most houses are being build with electrical based heating solutions, we're being pushed to electric cars, etc. etc., that power has to come from somewhere, data centres are the "low hanging fruit" at the moment but there will be more and more drains on the system as well as more and more power is needed on a 24/7 basis, the future is the house with 2 electrical cars, an electrical heating solution as well as loads of smart devices to make your life easier (any ad break shows this) but I don't know what is going to power it, for example in my house having 2 cars charged over night, 2 electrical showers in the morning as well as all the other "stuff" will mean I'll be using more power than a small factory of 20 years ago all while the cost of power goes up.

DoctorEdgeWild

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957639#Comment_117957639

I can vouch for this, been involved in building data centres for the last year and a half and there's an unbelievable amount of trades involved on site, absolutely massive projects and we're only a small part (some of the steelwork) but they've absolutely been behind recent expansion/new staff in my company. Security is crazy though, understandably considering data is more valuable than anything these days.

dudley72

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957639#Comment_117957639

The problem is we now don't have enough builders. For instance on facebook they have a guy who was working on a local site as a foreman, he got a job on facebook for more money and he was standing along the road pushing a button on traffic lights for about 12 months, it was his job to let traffic past and then turn the light red when one of the facebook trucks had to cross the road

This is why you are seeing such a shortage of tradesmen across housing and even doing off jobs. They can pick up handy numbers on a DC for big money. Fair play to them and might as well make good money while they can but Ireland needs more construction workers to cover off these people.

In terms of why DC's in Ireland well the reasons are clear and already discussed. I do think when we get these DC's into Ireland we should be reviewing the requirements, Facebook talks about they are fully using renewable energy, what they dont tell you is that renewable is the energy we would have been using for houses etc.

For instance, on facebook they have a massive roof space, yet they are talking about building a huge solar plant a couple of miles away in fields, why not get facebook to fill the roof of the DC's with solar panels? I know Kingspan had a plan to do something similar

horse7

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957557#Comment_117957557

He drives a VW transporter.

Clareman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957808#Comment_117957808

Chances are the roof of the data centre is used to get rid of a lot of heat so the whole place would need to be re-done to accommodate solar, other factors would be shading, facing south(ish), etc. etc., then the fact that we have vast periods without sun light which means the solar energy will need to be "stored" for night time use which would take up a lot of space in an already full area so it makes sense that they'll need a new location.

Again, in my opinion, the requirements for data centres are simple, companies (Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) need data centres to run their operations, for example as companies move to Office 365 this means that there's no need for companies to have their own Exchange server so they "rent" part of 1 that's located in a Microsoft data centre, in a roundabout way this will have a positive impact as a large number of servers can be turned off but all that will be seen is the power used by the Microsoft data centre, as these companies are already in Ireland it's in our interest to give them what they want, after all if they are to setup their data centres in another country what's to stop them taking a load of jobs with them?

salmocab

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957808#Comment_117957808

Facebooks roof space is covered with hundreds of units for cooling the data halls below.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957758#Comment_117957758

I work in the industry and recently left a company that 75% of their work was designing DC's across Europe. I now work for a company that 50% of its work involves designing and building DC's across Europe. That's just from the design side of things.

I recently worked on an Amazon project and the security on it was unreal.

Clareman

Considering the value of some of the equipment in there for scrap value alone I'm not surprised that security is so high, not to mention the retail cost of a lot of the components, 1 cloud server rack could have millions of euros worth of kit in it and that's before all the cabling around the place is taken into consideration, they aren't a cheap place to setup but once setup, outside of swopping out of older IT kit, they are relatively cheap to maintain onsite.

iColdFusion

The hypocrisy of the government blaming data centers for power shortages when ESB and Eirgrid are both semi-state companies is crazy, Government are acting like data centres just pop up out of nowhere instead of going through 2+ years of planning and consultations plus paying massive capital contributions to the ESB to get their power connections, any power shortages are 100% down to ESB/Eirgrid for just pocketing the money and not upgrading their generation capacity and networks.

https://www.esb.ie/tns/press-centre/2021/2021/03/12/esb-group-announces-full-year-results-for-the-year-ended-31-december-2020

EA Games have a good few of it's Video game servers located here too. Wait until the new Battlefield game is released in November. Major blackout on it's way. 🤣

DoctorEdgeWild

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117958561#Comment_117958561

It really is. Before I started in this place, I'd never considered the scale of the places as they are deliberately built 'out of the way'. The design work alone is crazy, then filter down through every possible trade, service and security, you've got a lot of jobs riding on them. (including mine!! :D)

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117958778#Comment_117958778

100%, the Government couldn't afford to stop them being built here. As another poster stated, its not as though they have just popped up out of the ground. You could be 2/3 years from planning to design before it gets to site. Unfortunately, IMO, we need DC's here in the country. The knock on effect if they stopped constructing them would be similar enough to what happened in 2008 when the country relied so much on the construction of houses. The ripple effect was felt throughout each industry.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117958670#Comment_117958670

Absolutely. There was a comment in one of the other DC-related threads about how Covid had prevented essential maintenance on some of the gas-powered generators. I'm really curious in what way Covid contributed to essential maintenance not being done.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957631#Comment_117957631

The wind doesn't blow all the time.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957648#Comment_117957648

Sure dont we have lots of clouds floating free around the west of Ireland with no one making any use of them🤔

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117959090#Comment_117959090

Is usually down to mid level managers abdicating their responsibility to actually manage in a crisis by saying "but covid".

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957631#Comment_117957631

I lost touch with the story - so I do not know what is happening now - but Microsoft started "Project Natick" in 2014 off the coast of Scotland which would go one better than wind turbines.

They submerged an entire data centre in a kind of tube structure. They availed of the "Free" energy of tidal forces along with the "Free" cooling this involved. In fact last time I remember hearing about it the cooling of the entire system was 3% of the total running energy. Whereas some land based solutions have a 1:1 situation where 50% of the power used in running the data centre is to cool it.

I know the plan was to run the submerged data centre for a few years to see how it worked. Obviously maintenance was an issue as you can not simply send people down there to pull out broken hard drives and replace them. But if it worked it would be very interesting.

Also because of many bureaucracy issues it was estimated that while it takes nearly 2 years to set up and deploy a completely new land data centre - they reckon a submerged ocean based one could be done within 90 days.

Fandymo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957639#Comment_117957639

Yeah, it’s not like we need houses or anything.

Ash.J.Williams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117957542#Comment_117957542

electric cars are shite