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How Facebook puts petabytes of old cat pix on ice in the name of sustainability
When someone says the word "sustainability," the first thing that leaps into your mind is not a data center. These giant buildings full of computer, network, and storage gear are typically power-hungry behemoths with giant cooling systems that keep servers happy and chilled. Their power distribution systems lose kilowatts just shifting electricity from one form to another. And the farms of environmentally unfriendly backup batteries and diesel backup generators on site are there to nurse things along if the power all this demands suddenly disappears.
#Facebook #Centralization
Christopher Allan Webber likes this.
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Yes, I think that there's some computational efficiency in moving things to a shared computational structure. It doesn't necessarily need to be centralized though. That's a claim I have to back up, I guess. Backing up that claim is part of my life's work? ;)
But I think it's definitely true that every year I increase my computing resources. I have far more, not less, computers running in my life than I used to. Some of them have become more efficient over time, but they've also grown more powerful. I'm sure I'm still consuming more resources though, even just at home. Meanwhile, I'm certainly participating in a fraction of many, many servers doing my bidding across the planet. I don't see them, but having worked in megadatacenters, at least I can visualize the process in ways some others can't.
The pressure to constantly upgrade and throw away old machines exists at datacenters just as it does here. You don't see it though if you aren't living or working there. I wish I could explain more about this directly, but I have some fear about telling stories about where my NDA applies.
Christopher Allan Webber at 2015-11-09T22:09:06Z
Sean Tilley, Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) likes this.
The problem though is that efficiency never saves resources. The politicians here call efficiency "the third energy source" or something like that. Jevons calls bullshit.
The biggest one is server virtualization. In the past you would either share services in a single server and separate your users by userid and filesystem location, otherwise, you would put additional hardware or a machine for a given customer or purpose. Now servers are a lot faster, capacity is getting cheaper and virtualization software is available in commodity hardware, you can provide services
with less hardware than in the past.
I think the biggest challenge is moving from legacy system to new ones. That is one reason why old machines are not moving out fast enough. As new services come by, you still have to maintain those legacy systems around. That is why you end up with computer proliferation. However, I think that this is improving being that even through emulation, you can run some of these legacy programs in commodity hardware.
The real reason why "the cloud" is attractive is because it is cheaper to pay a provider than having your staff managing those systems. I do not think that it is because of environmental reasons. Yes, data centers today can be made greener with modern facilities, but at the end, it is all about the bottom line.
I do have more computers now in my life, some of them must be recycled. :). However I tend to keep computers for a long while to my wife's chagrin.
Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠), Sean Tilley, Christopher Allan Webber likes this.