Data center: towards the Information Power Station (First part…)
Feb 8th, 2010 by Alessandro De Danieli
In 1882 Edison switched on the world’s first large-scale electrical supply network that provided 110 volts direct current to fifty-nine customers in Manhattan; in 1883 in Milan, between Santa Radegonda and Agnello streets, started the production the 1st power station among Continental Europe.
The birth of the first power stations was a crucial junction in the evolution of modern society: not for nothing that this event was one of the most important of those that characterized the so-called Second Industrial Revolution.
In his book “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google,” (W. Norton & Company, 2009), American writer Nicholas Carr draws a suggestive analogy between the rise of the very large data centers as the ones built recently and the Second Industrial Revolution. Just as nascent industries, once powered by water wheels, began able to run their machines thanks to constant and reliable voltage generated in distant power plants, advances in technology and transmission speeds are permitting computing to function like one utility, a distant but reliable source of services. Really, this is exactly what the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt meant when last May in one of his speech said to the press that “The Browser is the Computer”.
The metaphor is interesting: we can expand it. Till the 90s, computers used to be stand-alone devices. If you wanted to do something more than looking at the prompt line, you had to buy a software and install it on your PC. Then, the World Wide Web arrived in the late 90s. Suddenly, if you had a network connection and a browser, you could read pages and pages of information not contained in you hard disk. Think about YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google Search, Yahoo Mail: none of those programs is running on one PC’s hard disk. They’re all utility services that everyone can share with people living in every part of the world. And what is very interesting is that no one really cares where our software is coming from, what are the features of this software, in which way it is using the PC: if it works it’s OK. The PC began to be fed by outside, and the focus started to be on the connection.
The analogy is clear: the development of the electric grid move the focus from the need of appropriate source of power to the need of connection to the grid. No one (except for few electrical engineers) is interested into frequency, voltage, power quality… We trust the Net.
…..TO BE CONTINUED…..
Quotes:
[1] http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/interview.shtml, N. G. Carr
[2] “A Practical Guide to the Early Days of Data Center Containers”, October 29th, M. Manos.
[3] “Data Center Overload”, Published June 8th 2009, The New York Times, T. Vanderbilt
[4] “Estimating total power consumption by servers in the U.S. and the World”, February 15th 2007, J. Koomey.
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