Wired magazine has coined a new term for the massive data centers built in Pacific Northwest by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Cloudware is, ironically, a return of the centralized data and bandwidth power houses caused by decentralized and distributed nature of the Internet. George Gilder thinks we’re witnessing something monumental:
According to Bell’s law, every decade a new class of computer emerges from a hundredfold drop in the price of processing power. As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born? How will we feed it? How will it be tamed? And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?
Nicholas Carr published a lengthy entry contemplating the consequences of this turn in computing:
In arguing that computing is “almost free,” while at the same time describing how costly it actually is, Gilder overlooks the paradox of abundance: that providing a resource in the quantities required to make it seem “free” can be a very expensive undertaking.
Now on to my feelings about this:
The fascination with the large data centers seems to come and go away every few years. You can just look at the Level 3 Communications chart to differentiate the period of enamourment with the technology followed by the period of disappointment. Server farms and giant data centers are cool to talk about, but in reality they provide only marginal advantage - you save on new server racks, when the data center companies are charging extra due to the boom times. With enough capital and commitment anyone can replicate a large data center, and if the business required, it wouldn’t take too much for someone decidedly uncool like Time Warner or News Corp. to invest another billion in a data center of their own, where “thousands and thousands” of servers would provide for a great background for executive photo shoots.
The argument on owning the vital piece of the architecture is important, as your growth shouldn’t be potentially bound by what Hurricane Electric or Equinox decide to charge. However, such architecture, as the aforementioned Level 3 stock chart displays, can be a liability at times when the market is undergoing a downturn, and a Web company finds itself in the business of renting out the server racks to justify the costs of building a data center.
Glider’s Wired article seems to glorify the fact that Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are all building in Pacific Northwest. That’s Dalles, OR, Wenatchee, WA and Quincy, WA. All located relatively closely to one another and in proximity to major dams, which allow for cheap electricity. So the “cloudware” will work great when I launch a YouTube clone, which will happen to hit big in broadband-wealthy Korea, right? Eeh, so that’s a problem as well. International traffic accounts for huge portions of growth at Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. In fact, when you look at Comscore numbers for US traffic in September 2006 and Comscore numbers for August 2006 in the United States, you will notice an interesting trend as far as total Internet users - the number of unique US Internet users fell from August 2006 to September 2006. Granted, there’re a few statistical issues here and there, and who knows how ComScore arrives at the exact numbers, so the US traffic might have even grown, but the fact is - US Internet usage growth is pretty much at its plateau right now. The growth for Internet’s top tier is going to come from China, India, Brazil and other emerging markets, and surprisingly the ping times to those places are not too great from either one of Pacific Northwest data centers.