Where in the world is my data center?
June 22, 2012
In a world where data centers can be built on massive sites in rural North Carolina, in modular pods dropped down in Las Vegas, or in renewable energy-powered countries like Iceland, data center operators have a lot of options. Many are looking to differentiate themselves on efficiency and geography, says Kevin Timmons, the CTO of co-location data center operator CyrusOne, at GigaOM’s Structure event on Thursday.
Energy efficiency might not have been so important in the past, said Timmons, but that’s increasingly changing as the customer sees they can write a smaller check for using less power. Tate Cantrell, CTO of Verne Global, which built a data center in Iceland that runs completely on the country’s hydro and geothermal power, says renewable energy is also becoming an increasingly important factor in deciding where to build data centers…
Cantrell sees a world where the data and processing move to where the low cost clean power is. “I envision data centers being built in deserts next to giant solar farms, and it’s this crowd that can deliver the innovation needed to make that happen,” said Cantrell, referring to the Structure audience.
The typical enterprise customer might not be ready for all of these new features, says Timmons. A fast-growing enterprise is about four years behind the Facebooks, Microsofts, and Yahoos of the world, he said. There’s still a need for some legacy architecture, and it’s about getting efficiencies from yesterday’s infrastructure, said Jason Mendenhall, EVP of Cloud, Switch, which built a massive data center in Las Vegas.
Increasingly data center operators are having to look at the big picture, which includes power and water and location. Facilities managers would previously start taking over when we data center architecture and design was needed, but now these types of efficiency constraints are being baked into the design of the hardware itself, said Mendenhall. The Switch data center has four different, patented dynamic ways to cool itself where the site chooses the most efficient method of cooling at any one time.