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Total Number of Subscribers: 428 |
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Date: 30 May 2008 |
Compiled by Mr. M. Sathya Kumar |
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The Real
- World Implications of the rise of internet computing
EVEN when the sky is blue over Quincy, clouds hang in the air.
The small town in the centre of the state of Washington is home to half a
dozen huge warehouses that power the global “computing
clouds” run by internet companies such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. The size
of several football pitches, these data centres are filled with thousands of
powerful computers and storage devices and are hooked up to the internet via
fast fibre-optic links. Yet even more intriguing than the buildings' size is their
location. Quincy is literally in the middle of nowhere, three hours' drive
from the nearest big city, Seattle. But it turns out to be a perfect location
for data centres. As computing becomes a utility, with services that can be
consumed from everywhere and on any device, ever more thought is being put
into where to put the infrastructure it needs. Where the cloud touches down is not just the business of the
geeks. 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. 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 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. The availability of cheap power is mainly why there are so many
data centres in Quincy. It is close to the Columbia River, with dams that
produce plenty of cheap hydroelectric power. There is water for cooling, fast
fibre-optic links, and the remoteness provides security. For similar reasons,
Google chose to build a new data centre at The Dalles, a hamlet across the
Columbia River in the state of Oregon. Such sites are in short supply in America, however. And with
demand for computing picking up in other parts of the world, the boom in
data-centre construction is spreading to unexpected places. Microsoft is
looking for a site in Siberia where its data can chill. Iceland has begun to
market itself as a prime location for data centres, again for the cool
climate, but also because of its abundant geothermal energy. Hitachi Data
Systems and Data Islandia, a local company, are planning to build a huge
data-storage facility (pictured at top of article). It will be underground,
for security and to protect the natural landscape. So will all data centres end up in remote places like Quincy or
Iceland? Not necessarily. For many applications, speed is of the essence. To
make sure that its web-search results show up almost instantly, Google has to
distribute its data centres around the world. Financial-services firms want
to have access to trading data in real time, which explains the high density
of data centres near New York and London. And fast-moving online games must
be hosted near their players. Even when speed does not matter, many firms want their servers
close by, says Mike Foust, the boss of Digital Realty Trust, which builds and
rents out data centres. Sometimes this is for maintenance; sometimes it is
because “server huggers” do not want to let go.
Security also counts. The Boyd Company, which advises companies about where to put
their data centres, thinks more should be built in the provinces. Demand for
secure locations for back-up centres, which many firms now have to maintain,
will give rise to huge regional data centres, such as the one being built in
Newport in Wales. The criteria that companies use to pick a site keep evolving,
says Mike Manos, Microsoft's director of data centres. His team feeds 35 sets
of data into an electronic “heat” map of the world. With
colours that range from green to red, it shows where conditions are
favourable and which places should be avoided. And Microsoft needs a lot of
choice: if a new service suddenly becomes popular, it needs to be able to
increase computing capacity quickly. That is also why it uses shipping
containers pre-loaded with up to 2,000 servers, which can be up and running
within hours. In the firm's Chicago data centre, over 200 such containers
will populate an entire floor. 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). Regulation is a
factor, too. SWIFT,
a bank-transfer consortium, has announced plans to build a data centre in
neutral Switzerland, so that data collected in Europe will not be stored in
an American facility, where it could be subpoenaed by the United States
government. In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more
complex. “Virtualisation” technology already allows the
software running on individual servers to be moved from one data centre to
another, mainly for back-up reasons. One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy
is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so
much as
of a computing atmosphere. Source
: The Economist Print Edition |
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