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.
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.
I am not sure Arun. Storage technologies are evolving much faster than transmission ones.
Isn’t it ironic that we used coal to power our trains at the turn of the last century and now we are burning it sight unseen and out of mind to power these server farms, which are growing exponentially with the pace of the Internet and our electronic dependence in general. We are so tied into these systems, yet in the 1800s a massive solar flare threw off pre-computerized telegraph systems worldwide. All it would take would be one coronal mass ejection aimed earthward to do the same to us, but we would be much more damaged by virtue that electronic circuitry not only controls much of our digitized money but even our sanitation system water delivery equipment, our gasoline pumps and our electronic ignition systems in cars, planes and other forms of transportation. This is a global crisis that is inevitable, yet we have people pushing forward with unsecured data centers that are not designed to withstand this sort of thing, and even proponents of paperless data systems, e-voting machines, medical records, etc.
We have literally become dumbstruck by the wonders of technology the past 20-some years, but blind to the flaws; namely, the insecurity of these systems in terms of hacking and fraud — the Chinese have the power to bring down the US electric grid, no outbursts on the part of the sun required — and the environmental consequence. As harmful as paper manufacturing is on the environment, how much more is the creation of circuit boards containing heavy metals toxic to human health, scrap that is shipped overseas where the poor in Africa and China sift through it without protective gear? Paper, by contrast, produces paper dust, less toxic by comparison, and can be fully recycled, yet we all believe, dumbstruck as we are by technology, that Kindle will save the forests. What about all the technology that didn’t need to be plugged in and recharged years ago. Do we think all that charging and plugging in is “green”? Ha! It is coal power, most likely! How ironic it is that we come full circle. Spewing out coal-fired trains in the early days of the last century, blissfully burning it away now for our laptops, iPods and cell phones. I’m guilty too. But at least the blinders are starting to fall off. The public needs to awaken to the reality that digitizing anything and everything is a lateral environmental move. “Green” is really “gray” — the gray cloud of coal byproducts spewing out of a power plant smokestack to power all this modern tech. And that doesn’t even begin to encompass the resource drain created by the multiplicity of server farms, football fields in size, that will have to be built around the globe to accommodate our infatuation with the Internet.
True: The Internet has very real benefits. Just the same I don’t want to do everything virtually. Some of life just has to be seen, felt, smelled, touched the “analog way”. The digital world is an escape, not a replacement for real experiences like sharing a family meal, playing a board game where people socialize face-to-face or feeling the sensation of wet grass or a sandy beach beneath your feet. The wonders and magic of technology, however, have enabled many of us, if not most of us, to lose touch with the reality that there’s no substitute for the real things in life. How much time do we waste staring at a MySpace or Facebook page, focusing our wide field of vision on a single cell phone screen in pursuit of some all-important question like “What’s up?”?
And need I even mention how many Gen X, Y and Hipsters are going to end up on the government doll by the time they enter their 40s-50s because they spent their entire life in front of a video game system, a Blackberry, an iPod and a keyboard? Talk about the “Blackberry thumb”, the carpel tunnel syndrome, the spinal problems associated with the fact that human bodies were not designed to become as sedentary as this technology encourages us to be. And they thought television was bad that way once! Now everything gears us toward being fat, out of shape and eventually sufferers of all manner of repetitive strain syndromes. God help us if we don’t learn how to use technology wisely. It will eat up our environmental resources even as we fantasize that the digital world is a green universe, and turn our bodies to mush even as we kid ourselves about becoming more “productive”.
If only the tech Honeymoon would end and people would begin to look at the Big Picture. High tech has its benefits, yes, but moderation, it is not one of them. Now we have studies coming out of universities and hospitals telling parents not to let their kids stay up on the Internet or texting all night because they tend to be more depressed, fatigued, perform more poorly in school and are more likely to miss classes entirely. Well, duh! It is as if the entire developed world on this planet has “gone geek”. It’s time we got back to reality — that thing we used to call “having a life”. And here’s a hint: It doesn’t involve Twitter or flirting with complete strangers on the Internet, who if if they spend that kind of time on the ‘net at all are probably either losers or child pedophiles, whom you wouldn’t even think about holding a conversation with in real life, so why do it “virtually”? My point being, all things come with a dark side: environmental, social, physical, spiritual. It’s time the public woke up to this reality because if we don’t, go on “upgrading” those coal-powered trains for coal-powered server farms of ever growing proportions. We need to come to the realization that there’s no free lunch.