As I was watching the local 10 o’clock news last night to catch up on the latest on the flooding in the surrounding Omaha area, I was hit by a piece of unexpected news. The Army Corps of Engineers had earlier in the day released a map and began to warn residents that a major portion of downtown Omaha could be under as much as 10 feet of water should a levee that borders the Missouri River fail. Yet what many do not know is that the Omaha area is the home for datacenters of many of the world’s largest and most well-known Internet companies such as Google, Paypal and Yahoo.
The factors that contribute to making Omaha attractive as a site for many of the world’s largest data centers are numerous.
- Abundant amounts of land (it is not called flyover country for nothing!)
- Ample bandwidth
- Central US location
- Educated workforce
- Multiple sources of power (Despite the flooding, there are a number of dams on the Missouri river that provide a lot of power to the Midwest)
- Well-protected. (The Strategic Air Command is just to the south of Omaha.)
Of these six factors, the one that probably contributes making Omaha most attractive as a location for datacenters is it’s ample supply of bandwidth. As has been explained to me, when the Cold War was still going on, the US government ran large amounts of fibre optic cable into the Omaha area to supply the Strategic Air Command (SAC) with sufficient telecommunications connections for the Air Force.
But when the Cold War ended, the US government no longer had a need for all of these telecommunications lines and made them available for sale. It was at this point large telecommunications providers scooped them up in anticipation of eventually making them available to the public.
So while this ample supply of Internet bandwidth is certainly not the only reason that datacenters for some of the world’s largest Internet companies are located in the Omaha area, it continues to be a contributing factor.
Yet when I share this information with people, the first question that they often ask is, “Aren’t tornados a concern?” They certainly are as Nebraska is in Tornado Alley. But having worked in and visited a number of data centers in the Omaha area for these companies, they are typically built like fortresses and in locations that make the possibility of them being affected by a tornado a remote possibility.
The larger potential natural disaster that companies with datacenters in the Omaha area have to manage is what they are seeing right now: Floods. The entire eastern side of Douglas County where Omaha resides is bordered by the Missouri River. So while Omaha and even most of Nebraska has not seen unusual amounts of rainfall this year, the Missouri River is fed by rivers as far north as North Dakota and as far west as Montana.
Well it just so happens this year that the Missouri River was hit with a double whammy. First, the Dakotas experienced an unusually large amount of rainfall in April and May that filled the reservoirs along the Missouri River. Second, there was an unusual amount of snowfall this past winter in Montana. That snow is now melting with all of that water draining into the Missouri River and putting Omaha at risk.
So why is virtualization helping to keep the Internet from going underwater? Again, it is not for the reasons you may think. When these datacenters are built, the planners know where the flood plains are in the Omaha area. To the best of my knowledge no datacenter is located in the flood plain even though local Omaha landmarks such the airport, the north city power plant and even the new home of the College World Series were built there and are now potentially at risk.
Rather the way that virtualization is helping to keep the Internet afloat is by enabling administrators and engineers to remotely manage these sites and not requiring them to come into work every day for the simple reason that a number of them cannot get to work. The floodwaters have left portions of the Interstate system around Omaha under water which are the major arteries on which people travel to get to and from work, especially those that live to the north of Omaha.
Normally not being able to come to work for a few days is not a problem but as high as the water levels are and as much water is being released upstream, it may be August and even December in some cases before the flood waters recede and these roads are accessible. Even then, it is unclear now if they will be passable once the flood waters recede and how long it will take to repair them.