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Recently, Google announced the availability . It is one of the most modern data centers that have been invested in by companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, and others along the 41st parallel line in the United States.
Each of these companies invest billions of dollars in these four cities:
- Microsoft to one of the largest data centers in Des Moines, Iowa, and located in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
- Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), to a modern data center in Des Moines.
- Google to a data center near Omaha, Nebraska, in addition to a recent investment in Salt Lake City.
- built a 1.5 petaflop supercomputer in Cheyenne, and it's one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
- The US National Security Agency operates in Salt Lake City, Utah.
So what makes the 41st parallel so special, causing various companies to invest billions of dollars building data centers in these cities?
The answer is that most of the traffic flowing from the east to the west of the United States and back passes through each of these places through a large collection of fiber optic cables owned by a large number of telecom companies, such as: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Level 3, Zayo, Fibertech, Windstream and others.
This fiber optic network infrastructure gives data centers access to a huge number of wide channels, spurring the investment cycle - more data centers attract more traffic, which in turn leads to the construction of more fiber optic backbones, which again leads to building more data centers.
Why did all these telecom giants choose to locate their backbones along this route across the US? Because each of these cables runs underground along a continuous right-of-way, approximately 60 meters wide, along the very first transcontinental railroad, which was completed in 1869. The U.S. government granted title to the land to the Union Pacific railroad by signing . And if you are a telecommunications company that wants to lay a new optical backbone across the United States in 2019, you will need to coordinate your project with only one company - Union Pacific. This small strip of land cuts completely across the US, as seen in this 1864 railroad project:
An example of such a telecom neighborhood is EchoStar's main teleport in Cheyenne, Wyoming. EchoStar operates 25 geostationary satellites for content and film broadcasting. They bought a large piece of land next to the Union Pacific right-of-way, which allowed them to connect directly to the transcontinental optical cables buried next to the railroad.
In the picture below, you can clearly see the line separating the boundaries of the EchoStar property, the northern one coincides with the boundary of the Union Pacific right-of-way.
Another example of such a neighborhood is the data centers of Microsoft and the NCAR supercomputing center in Wyoming. Both are located within a kilometer of the Union Pacific railroad:
And why was the railroad built along the 41st parallel, from Iowa to California?
Since 1853, the United States has been conducting in order to find out the best route for the new railway - along the 47th, 39th, 35th and 32nd parallels. In 1859, US Secretary of War Jefferson Davis strongly supported the southern route from New Orleans to San Diego - it was shorter, there were no high mountains to overcome, and there were no snowfalls that would increase the cost of maintaining a new railroad. roads. But in the 1850s, no northern congressman would vote for a southern route that would help the Confederate slave economy, and no southern congressman would vote for a northern route. This stalemate continued until the outbreak of the American Civil War. When the southern states withdrew from the union in 1861, the remaining politicians from the north quickly voted in favor of the Railroad Act of 1862, which secured the start of the transcontinental road at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and its route from west to east along 41 th parallel.
Why Council Bluffs? There were many cities willing to compete for this privilege. But it was Council Bluffs that was chosen, as the Plate River valley, due west of the city, gently rose to the Rocky Mountains, offering a convenient source of water for steam locomotives. The same water is now used for modern data centers along this route.
After the construction of the first railroad was completed, Western Union immediately installed the first telecommunications corridor in the railroad's right-of-way, and in a short time was transmitting all telegrams from one end of the continent to the other. Later, when AT&T built long-distance telephone lines in the early XNUMXth century, they were also built along this railroad. These highways grew and were built on, until they turned into a huge accumulation of communication highways that exists in this strip of land today.
This is how political decisions made more than 150 years ago have now determined the location of many billions of dollars of investment in modern data centers.
Source: habr.com