The Economics of Server Farms

I just came across a very interesting article on The Economist which describes the trend about creating new data centers around the world. Basically corporations are investing more money than ever into those super computing warehouses, and the challenge now is to find locations that will supply enough and reliable energy to them. Here is a quote:

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 servers become more numerous, powerful and densely packed, more energy is needed to keep the data centres at room temperature. Often just as much power is needed for cooling as for computing. The largest data centres now rival aluminium smelters in the energy they consume. Microsoft’s $500m new facility near Chicago, for instance, will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts. As a result, finding a site for a large data centre is now, above all, about securing a cheap and reliable source of power, says Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge, a website that chronicles the boom in data-centre construction.

I wonder if in the near future we will see a trend towards the outsourcing of data centers.

Daniel Scocco on May 27, 2008 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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2 Responses to “The Economics of Server Farms”

Arun on May 27th, 2008 7:03 pm

Outsourcing of data centers apart, the real question is what happens when the economics of storing data limitlessly catches up with data upload frequency. Simply put, we are right now in an era where data on the web in any form is stored. But future generations might face a situation where data has to be specifically chosen to be saved.

Just like there was the era of automation with cars and fuel based machines growing without any concern about fuel reserves and now the whole issue around fuel sources, there will come a time when data as such will not be all about saving on to a server.
Daniel Scocco on May 27th, 2008 7:29 pm

I am not sure Arun. Storage technologies are evolving much faster than transmission ones.