Tech Titans Building Boom

Description

The serene countryside around the Columbia River in the northwestern United States has emerged as a major, and perhaps unexpected, battleground among Internet powerhouses. That’s where Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo have built some of the world’s largest and most advanced computer facilities: colossal warehouses packed with tens of thousands of servers that will propel the next generation of Internet applications. Call it the data center arms race.

The companies flocked to the region because of its affordable land, readily available fiber-optic connectivity, abundant water, and even more important, inexpensive electricity. These factors are critical to today’s large-scale data centers, whose sheer size and power needs eclipse those of the previous generation by one or even two orders of magnitude.

These new data centers are the physical manifestation of what Internet companies are calling cloud computing. The idea is that sprawling collections of servers, storage systems, and network equipment will form a seamless infrastructure capable of running applications and storing data remotely, while the computers people own will provide little more than the interface to connect to the increasingly capable Internet.

All of this means that what had been not-so-glamorous bit players of the tech world—the distant data centers—have now come into the limelight. But getting their design, operation, and location right is a daunting task. The engineers behind today’s mega data centers—some call them Internet data centers, to differentiate them from earlier ones—are turning to a host of new strategies and technologies to cut construction and operating costs, consume less energy, incorporate greener materials and processes, and in general make the facilities more flexible and easier to expand. Among other things, data centers are adopting advanced power management hardware, water-based cooling systems, and denser server configurations, making these facilities much different from ...

Original URL

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb09/7327

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb09/7327