Data Centers as Information Substations

Quotes from:

Data Center Overload
Tom Vanderbilt, NYT, June 8, 2009.

The data center is our railroad; it doesn’t matter what kind of train you put on it. . . .

While it once took 30 to 50 years for electricity costs to match the cost of the server itself, the electricity on a low-end server will now exceed the server cost itself in less than four years — which is why the geography of the cloud has migrated to lower-rate areas. . . .

The specter of infinitesimal delay is why, when the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s oldest, upgraded its trading platform in 2006, it decided to locate the bulk of its trading engines 80 miles — and three milliseconds — from Philadelphia, and into NJ2 (a data center located in NJ), where the time to communicate between servers is down to a millionth of a second. (Latency concerns are not limited to Wall Street; it is estimated that a 100-millisecond delay reduces Amazon’s sales by 1 percent.) . . .

We’re at the beginning of the information utility. The past is big monolithic buildings. The future looks more like a substation — the data center represents the information substation of tomorrow. . . .