Amazon’s new Cloud Data Center in Virginia

Retail/Infrastructure company recently leased a 110,000 square foot property in northern Virginia to expand its data center footprint. More than 500,000 developers are now using AWS, and Amazon’s S3 storage now houses more than 50 billion objects. But the data center expansion may also reflect Amazon’s ambitions to host cloud applications for the federal government. Last week Amazon’s AWS Federal unit held training sessions for IT contractors who already have relationships with federal customers.

Amazon is building out its own infrastructure in its new facility in northern Virginia. Amazon buys a large volume of servers to support its cloud computing operations. It was the top customer for Rackable Systems/SGI in 2008, buying more than $86 million of the company’s cloud-optimized servers and storage. Last week Amazon’s AWS Federal unit held training sessions for IT contractors who already have relationships with federal customers.

While other cloud builders like Facebook add computing capacity by leasing turn-key “wholesale” data center space to save time and money, Amazon is building out its own infrastructure in its new facility in northern Virginia. The company also has international data center operations in Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Amazon revealed those locations as part of its CloudFront content delivery network (CDN). Amazon offers “availability zones” that allow developers to store a copy of their site or application at a second location in case a data center is knocked offline - which happened last week when a lightning strike damaged the power distribution system at an Amazon facility, knocking EC2 customers offline for about four hours.

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