The Data center That Came By Truck - by Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Jul 12 2010)

1. 

   I’ve had several weeks of non-stop cloud indoctrination over at eWEEK. So when I heard of a very data center innovation that is the exact opposite, I did a pretty theatrical double-take.

    

   In the last month or so I’ve had a cloud forum, a cloud webinar, umpteen virtualisation events, and just tons of news stories about the cloud. The EU wants cloud standards, users want cloud (business) standards. Cisco is doing it and IBM is doing it. The UK government is pretty much making sure all its departments will do it, by cutting their capital IT budgets as a means of looking tough over the deficit..

    

   Everyone is buying services not servers, it seems. So it’s only a matter of time before the private data center shrivels up and dies, right?

    

   Apparently not. I just had a release from Colt, pushing modular data centers. It seems that people still want data centers. They want them so bad, they’ll pay someone to make them, pack them on lorries and ship the whole building to them, in sections, within four months.

    

   Whatever the success of cloud - and Colt itself sells cloud services - people’s data centers are still growing out of control, they explained. And trucks full of servers and pre-fabricated buildings may be the only way to meet those demands in time.

    

   Which raises a couple of thoughts.

    

   Firstly, if these people are in the UK, and they have that little control over their data centers, they are in for a shock. When the cap-and-trade carbon credit system starts to bite, large companies will have to reduce their energy use by five percent... and they will have to do this every single year.

    

   Secondly, I wonder how the green equation works out for these facilities.

    

   They are built to meet higher PUE ratings than you’d get installing servers in a pre-existing building. Although it’s a very theoretical figure, since PUE actually depends a lot on where you plonk these buildings down.

    

   But what about the energy cost in moving the buildings over what could be quite a distance?  Colt is building these data centers in the North of England, and some will be shipped at least as far as Paris, France.

    

   That’s got to add to the carbon footprint.

    

   I’m guessing that the energy use in these facilities is so high, that the energy used to deliver them would amortise pretty well over the lifetime of the building (but I’d be very interested to see the calculation).

    

   But on another level, the whole thing looks bizarre. These things process data, which can be moved around with very little energy at all (though network energy costs are a concern). Surely it must be more efficient to move the data to the data center than the other way round?

    

   Which brings us back, of course, to the cloud. It seems that the hype about it may be over-blown, and there may be more in the stories about companies’ reluctance to trust cloud services.

    

   I’d like to think that giant data centers scooting along our highways will be only a temporary phenomenon, and data will quickly be virtualised away into larger and more efficient centers.

    

   But I suppose that might be just indoctrination...  clouding my vision.

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