Two words: data centres. If you live in Iceland, Greenland or Prague you might have one as a neighbour. Data centres like to live where electricity is cheap. That's because the biggest of them consume half the output of a small nuclear power plant, according to a Forbes Magazine (Sept. 29th) article on Cisco Systems and their development of the switch that affords their optimum operation. For simple folk like myself this is hard to get the head around. Cisco calls its switches "Nexus" and here's what Forbes says about their job: "While the Internet looks pretty smooth, the storage, computer and telecommunication standards on which things operate are almost as different as a canal is from a superhighway. Unifying them into one system is the job of the Nexus switch, which took several years and perhaps $1.7 billion in engineering effort to develop." These switches are described as "traffic cops", the brains of massive computing centres popping up near cheap power. A single switch moves 2.5 trillion bits a second. Next gen switches will spew out the equivalent of 400 feature-length films a second. A single 250-megawatt data centre means a $200 million dollar sale for Cisco, and that's just for the switch. At the 30 to 50 megawatt level each sale is worth about $40 million. I wonder if the salespeople are on commission?
Of course, YouTube is just one of the forces behind the rapid proliferation of these huge data centres. "Microsoft figures it will expand its network of them 64-fold over the next few years, just to handle some 200 services, including X-box online gaming, video and corporate software rented over the web. But YouTube apparently adds about 57,000 video clips a week to its library, and "Cisco's own WebEx service, designed for videoconferencing in the office, hosts up to 7 million minutes a month." Cisco CEO John Chambers uses their system to reduce his travel days, and the company is working on delivering him to customer offices by hologram. "Video" Chambers says "is the only technology I've seen CEOs turn around and sell to other CEOs."
Will you be able to recognize a data centre should it settle in your neighbourhood? Hint: look for windows with frost on the INSIDE. Most of that electricity is running the air conditioners.
For more on video from John Chambers please see my post of August 30. Suitably, Mr. Chambers delivers his thoughts by video.
