The Migrating Datacentre

I was reading my Economist on the train this afternoon, and there is a fascinating article on Datacentres (an area I spent some years in ). The online version is here. They were talking about the shifting location of datacentres. Its a nice article, but I didn't like this summary of history:

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.

...so I thought I'd add in some of the background.

There have always been servers in backrooms and garages, and there still are - but serious datacentres even then were more carefully planned than one assumes.

Pre the DotCom era, Telco datacentres were far out of urban areas and put in remote places, and designed so they could almost withstand nuclear winter - some were even under ground. IT companies tended to be in big industrial estates.

Come the dotcom era, Web Hosting companies (anyone recall Exodus?) located initially near big backbone PoPs (points of presence) as access points to the internet was not at that point ubiquitous. Then came the cage-huggers - many dotcoms were so poorly managed (and to be fair, remote ops were much poorer) that they pretty much had to be near their server cages each day, so the demand for web hosting space right next door (and even desks in the datacentre) - Silicon valley, Silicon Alley, Soho in London. This phase too passed as more PoPs appeared, and the industry started to locate around huge telepresence hubs.

And then there was 9/11, and suddenly companies wanted datacentres anywhere except in large cities.

The big issue over the years has been the ever increasing packing of racks and thus the increasing power usage per square foot - and as processors are near-perfect power-wastage devices but most are still designed to work at room temperature, for every watt you put into a data centre, you pretty much have to remove a watt - and as cooling is not nearly 100% efficient, you wind up expending more energy on cooling as on driving. In cities in summer (like New York, or Palo Alto) the added heat can tip systems over the edge. The problem with putting datacentres in the boondocks however is that if you need to run powerlines long distances, the cost and wastage is high

Hence the extreme interest in places with (i) cooler climates and (ii) cheap natural power, that are still close enough to backbone PoPs - and as the Economist notes, those sort of sites are not that common.

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.

Back to the pre dotcom world then - plus ca change

And like warehouse construction before, all sorts of towns, local governments etc will start to give grants to confuse the economic arguments. And like Warehouse towns before them, they will be sadly disappointed by the jobs they bring - a shed is a shed, whether for physical or information inventory.

The issue the Economist does not really mention is the increasing Green Lobby, which will start to also influence where datacentres can go. I also think they will have to start to develop chips that can run at higher temperatures, as every degree higher it can run saves a huge amount of cooling power.