Google Announces Its First Latin-American Data Center 52
1sockchuck writes "Google continues to expand the global reach of its infrastructure. Today the company announced plans to build its first data center in Latin America, investing $150 million in a facility in Quilicura, Chile. Google cited growing Internet use in Latin America, and said Chile has reliable infrastructure and a business-friendly environment. Last year Google announced plans for three new server farms in the Asia Pacific region, as well as a new data center in Dublin. Over the past year, Google has invested more than $2.5 billion on servers and data centers."
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::Facepalm::
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You should try Merken [wikipedia.org]
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While Chile is a Buddhist country, it's also hugely dependable on foreign aid and earthquakes. Why would Google want to do business there?
Chile is Roman Catholic, also not dependant at all on foreign aid.
We do have earthquakes, but most construction is resistant to it.
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"Chile is Roman Catholic, also not dependant at all on foreign aid.
We do have earthquakes, but most construction is resistant to it."
But why do they call it Latin-America when nobody speaks Latin?
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Latin isn't dead; it's just got a handful of national varieties: French, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, etc.
RTFA (Score:1)
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Chile is a nice sane modern country. For example it is the only Latin American member of the OECD. The last time I was there they had put in a new subway system - very nice indeed. Much less crime than Brazil. Strong currency too.
The reliable infrastructure is ok except when they are having an earthquake. The one in 1960 was a real beeeeotch for sure. 9.5 Mw. My wife was actually there when it happened. The tsunami from it was still 10m high and killed 142 people in Japan.
I think they are mostly recovered
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You must be thinking about a different planet.
I can hear it now... (Score:2)
"Backups? We ain't got no backups. We don't need no backups! I don't have to show you any stinkin' backups!"
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But if you back up your data in the cloud, your data could fall as rain anywhere in the world.
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You can't backup the "cloud" with the "cloud". I think if you tried, Frost Giants would appear throughout the land and bring about Ragnarok. Of which, Google would ensure it was properly indexed, furthering the events of the end of the world.
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Or they actually back up the cloud to tape:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-everyone.html [blogspot.com]
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/google-restoring-lost-gmail-data-from-tape-backups-2011031/ [geek.com]
Makes sense. (Score:4, Insightful)
South America, much like Africa, is relatively poorly served in regards to local datacenters and backbone network connectivity compared to North America, Europe, and East Asia.
There's a large market there, so it makes sense that companies would start investing in local resources to serve that market.
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I remember playing a game I enjoyed that ran dedicated servers for different regions, but not for Brazil and Australia. Due to constant complaining, they eventually divulged the reasons: the hosting services in those locations were god-awful expensive, tripling and quadrupling the cost of US datacenters with low bandwidth caps, and felt that deceptively hosting another region's server elsewhere and it being in name only was unethical. Apparently, a lot of games that run Oceanic servers meant to cover Aus
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True by calling Chile, Latin America is a bit like Calling Japan, Asia
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So, a true statement?
First Latin American? Do servers speak languages? (Score:2)
The headline sounds as if Google was interested in the national language of the country rather than the geographical location, IT infrastracture, maintenance cost and other country (but not language!) dependent factors. One would think that Guyana [wikipedia.org] or Suriname [wikipedia.org] were also out of question because of this. Why not call it the first South American server instead since it is located, you know, in South America?
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No, but voters do! Both candidates are vying for the Latin-American vote, so a Latin-American Data Center is a good political strategic move. They can sell Latin-American Data to both political parties! Listen to both of their speeches for signs of things that appeal to Latin-Americans' voters' likes in Google.
Additionally both candidates are after women voters. So the US Secret Service has taken a special interest in Latin-American women, just to be on the safe side.
I forgot, which candidates does Go
Unwarranted inferences and accurate descriptions (Score:2)
The headline doesn't suggest anything about why the location was selected. It simply reports a fact about the location that was selected.
Calling it the "first South American server" would be less accurate than calling it the "first Latin American data center", since while it is both in "Latin America" and in "South Amer
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> it is a data center, not, you know, a single server
The "server" is certainly a typo, as you should have guessed. Certain people like me have coherence problems expressing their thoughts and cannot live without an edit button.
> "Latin America" designation was chosen because its more significant
The whole issue is debatable, my personal opinion is that the main reason Google wants to have servers in South America is to improve the latency for people living there and take some load off international cab
Google Western Hemisphere Data Centers (non-US) (Score:3)
I was basing the comment on Google's published list of data center locations [google.com], which does not include Toronto, Dublin, or London.
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Because they already have facilities in Sao Paulo, so this wouldn't be worthy of a press release if they said South America
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Latin America is the proper name for all the former spanish and portuguese colonies. We have a shared language and 500 hundred years of shared history. A chilean from Rosario have more in common with a mexican from Tijuana than a catalonian from Barcelona with a spanish from Madrid. We are not a single country due the meddling of foreign powers and the short sightedness of most of our leadership since the XIX century. It makes sense that Googlee builds a datacenter tailored to the needs of the geopolitical,
IBM (Score:1)
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Google has not built a data center in Sao Paulo, Brazil. They use third-party facilities there.
I also found these:
http://www.google.com/about/jobs/locations/bogota/ops-support/data-center/ [google.com]
http://www.google.com/about/jobs/locations/buenos-aires/ops-support/data-center/ [google.com]
http://www.google.com/about/jobs/locations/lima/ops-support/data-center/ [google.com]
I don't why these misleading URLs exist. Maybe future Data Centers?
If you click on "Latin America (4)" you find only one entry: "Santiago (4)".
Business Friendly is just code for worker pliancy. (Score:2)
Business friendliness doesn't mean anything if it results in less freedoms for regular individuals.
Now if they were to do datacenters in otherwise sane places not completely controlled by business - e.g. north of the Mason-Dixon, east of the Mississippi (exc. Indiana) and New England - there might be something of note in the news.