Down on the server farm: Economist

May 22nd 2008 | SEATTLE

From The Economist print edition

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...

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Buy our stuff, save the planet: Economist

May 22nd 2008

From The Economist print edition

The internet could become as ungreen as aviation. A self-serving solution beckons

IN COMPUTING, buzzwords are in most cases just that. But the latest, “cloud computing”, stands for a real trend: computing is increasingly being supplied as a service over the internet (depicted as a “cloud” in many charts). Still, there is something wrong with the term.

It implies that by moving into the ether, computing is becoming weightless, with no connection to the resource-constrained real world. In fact the opposite is true. The corollary of more computing in the sky is more and bigger data centres on earth. These are warehouses packed with humming electronic gear, and in particular thousands of servers, the powerful computers that crunch and dish up data. The biggest facilities are the size of half a dozen football pitches and house as many as 80,000 servers (see article). They are huge energy hogs...

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Buy our stuff, save the planet: Economist