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Gordon Henderson wrote: > > The hardest part about building a data centre in a rural location is > assuring diverse routing of connections into the centre. Having setup such > facilities in the past myself, it's not always an easy thing to guarantee. > (And BT have been known to be liberal with the truth in the past too, but > then Telewest were no better at the time!) I'm assured the Met Office have done it, also to Sowton. The NHS also has a data centre on Sowton (at least I'm guessing that one of the unlabelled data centres is where they house the famed Exeter System), although I don't know what network redundancy they have I'm guessing it had better be comparable to other data centres. But as I suggested I'm not sure local data centres are that useful, unless you really need some hardware that hasn't been turned into a commodity. I'm intrigued by the GigaCenter from IBM and friends. It is going to be tough to compete with redundant hydroelectric power supply in terms of greenness (even given the rainfall on Dartmoor). When you see folks investing 9 figure sums in building dedicated data centers, and choosing the location as the best places for data centers in the North American continent, you realise that the world is pushing up the standards it expects from a hosting company. Carbon neutral hosting is going to be the name of the game. No doubt some folk have good reason for locating stuff in the EU, rather than the US or Canada, and government organisations like the NHS or Met Office probably have good reasons to keep systems physically in the UK or its territories. But beyond that, banks have been prepared to put systems into commercial data centers, and they have pretty stringent security concerns. Okay they sometimes want them inside locked cages in secure data centres. The real push will be local to your customers, not local to your techies. The local technical know-how is usually minimal - cable the KVM in / replace a disk - the other technical know how can flow down the wire. Local in this sense is topologically close in the network to the users, which is rarely going to mean Devon, and since we are talking light speed, a few hundred miles is irrelevant. Simon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html