Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Online auction site eBay has chosen a suburb of Salt Lake City as the site for a $334 million data center project. The company said yesterday that it has purchased land in South Jordan, Utah in the Daybreak Commerce Park, not far from where Oracle Corp. (ORCL) is building a huge data center.

The state Office of Economic Development offered eBay $27.3 million in tax incentives over 10 years to build the facility in Utah, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. The data center is expected to create about 50 jobs with wages averaging $49,200 a year, about 50 percent above the Salt Lake County annual median wage.

The facility, which could be as large as 250,000 square feet, would continue a regional expansion that has seen eBay acquire a large data center in Phoenix and expand its facility in Denver.

Data Centers are a hot topic these days.  No matter where you look, this once obscure aspect of infrastructure is getting a lot of attention.  For years, there have been cost pressures on IT operations and this, when the need for modern capacity is greater than ever, has thrust data centers into the spotlight.

Server and rack density continues to rise, placing DC professionals and businesses in tighter and tougher situations while they struggle to manage their IT environments.  And now hyper-scale cloud infrastructure is taking traditional technologies to limits never explored before and focusing the imagination of the IT industry on new possibilities.

Microsoft, has focused a lot of thought and research around how to best operate and maintain their global infrastructure.  They believe it is one of the most revolutionary changes to happen to data centers in the last 30 years.

Generation 4 modular data centers will take the flexibility of containerized servers—like those in Microsoft’s Chicago data center—and apply it across the entire facility.
(more…)