DATA HEAVENS
The bucolic image below is not an deserted international airport, but a humming internet data center in Iceland. As this Economist article titled "Down on the server farm" explains, trends in internet computing have made the prosaic question of where to situate one's data center an increasingly strategic one:
"Data centres are essential to nearly every industry and have become as vital to the functioning of society as power stations are. Lately, centres have been springing up in unexpected places: in old missile bunkers, in former shopping malls—even in Iceland.
"America alone has more than 7,000 data centres, according to IDC, a market-research firm. And each is housing ever more servers, the powerful computers that crunch and dish up data. In America the number of servers is expected to grow to 15.8m by 2010—three times as many as a decade earlier."
The piece goes onto to provide a mainstream account of the history of internet data centers to date:
"Until a few years ago, the location of servers was an afterthought, says Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor of environmental engineering at Stanford University. Most sat in cupboards or under desks. The computers in corporate data centres were often housed in the firm's basement. And dedicated “server farms”, which came of age during the dotcom bubble and often housed the machines of internet start-ups, were mostly built in Silicon Valley and other high-tech hubs.
The geography of the cloud
Now this haphazard landscape is becoming more centralised. Companies have been packing ever more machines into data centres, both to increase their computing capacity and to comply with new data-retention rules.
As space gets tight and energy costs climb, many firms have begun consolidating and simplifying their computing infrastructure. Hewlett-Packard, the world's biggest computer-maker, for instance, is replacing its 85 data centres across the world with just six in America.
Internet firms, meanwhile, need ever larger amounts of computing power. Google is said to operate a global network of about three dozen data centres with, according to some estimates, more than 1m servers. To catch up, Microsoft is investing billions of dollars and adding up to 20,000 servers a month."
As one might imagine, competition is increasing amongst various localities in many countries, to attract these new-fangled data centers. They're exciting new economic drivers for so many out of the way governments. The Economist piece notes:
"Yet it will not just be market economics that determines the shape of the clouds. Local governments give tax breaks in the hope that the presence of big data centres will attract other businesses (the computing plants themselves usually employ only a few dozen people)."
The picture of these new internet clouds should be even more unrecognizable in another decade, just as today's data centers are so different than the ones of just a decade ago.
There may be even bus tours to these critical and out of the way data centers, like the ones we have now to Hoover Dam.
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