On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 2:15 PM, <michael.dillon@bt.com> wrote:
Given that power and HVAC are such key issues in building big datacenters, and that fiber to the office is now a reality virtually everywhere, one wonders why someone doesn't start building out distributed data centers. Essentially, you put mini data centers in every office building, possibly by outsourcing the enterprise data centers. Then, you have a more tractable power and HVAC problem. You still need to scale things but it since each data center is roughly comparable in size it is a lot easier than trying to build out one big data center.
Latency matters. Also, multiple small data centers will be more expensive than a few big ones, especially if you are planning on average load vs peak load heat rejection models.
If you move all the entreprise services onto virtual servers then you can free up space for colo/hosting services.
There is no such thing in my experience. You free up a few thousand cores, they get consumed by the next lower priority project that was sitting around waiting on cpu.
You can even still sell to bulk customers because few will complain that they have to deliver equipment to three dara centers, one two blocks west, and another three blocks north. X racks spread over 3 locations will work for everyone except people who need the physical proximity for clustering type applications.
Racks spread over n locations that aren't within a campus will be more expensive to connect. /vijay
--Michael Dillon