cooling door

Sat Mar 29 18:57:57 UTC 2008

> Can someone please, pretty please with sugar on top, explain 
> the point behind high power density? 

It allows you to market your operation as a "data center". If
you spread it out to reduce power density, then the logical 
conclusion is to use multiple physical locations. At that point
you are no longer centralized.

In any case, a lot of people are now questioning the traditional
data center model from various angles. The time is ripe for a 
paradigm change. My theory is that the new paradigm will be centrally
managed, because there is only so much expertise to go around. But
the racks will be physically distributed, in virtually every office 
building, because some things need to be close to local users. The
high speed fibre in Metro Area Networks will tie it all together
with the result that for many applications, it won't matter where
the servers are. Note that the Google MapReduce, Amazon EC2, Haddoop
trend will make it much easier to place an application without
worrying about the exact locations of the physical servers.

Back in the old days, small ISPs set up PoPs by finding a closet 
in the back room of a local store to set up modem banks. In the 21st
century folks will be looking for corporate data centers with room
for a rack or two of multicore CPUs running XEN, and Opensolaris
SANs running ZFS/raidz providing iSCSI targets to the XEN VMs.

--Michael Dillon