It’s not every day in technology journalism that you get threatened with death. As it turned out, this threat was quite amusing, coming as it did from Tony Henderson, managing director of ICT vendor Bailey-Teswaine. Why would this seemingly mild-mannered exec want me “sleeping with the fishes”?
Well, at the time we were discussing one of his firm’s more recent ICT
projects outfitting a datacentre to service St Pancras International. I asked
what I thought was a fairly innocuous question: “So where is St Pancras
International’s datacentre?”
“If I told you that,” said Henderson, “I’d have to kill you.” So there you have
it, the first law of datacentre security don’t tell anybody where it is.
If the predictions in technology guru Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Big Switch, come to pass, datacentres like this will be a thing of the past, replaced by monster utility computing centres, whose size and power will dwarf even Google’s enormous facilities. These will cater for every conceivable enterprise computing need.
Frankly, I’m a bit sceptical about this scenario, which even Carr concedes is probably decades away. My main problem with this utility computing model has to do with energy. The world is already having to cope with rising oil prices, which could see the cost of a barrel hitting $200 by December. The kind of mega-datacentres that Carr envisages will probably consume the same amount of power as a sizable town. What this energy will cost decades down the road, I wouldn’t care to predict, but I wouldn’t mind betting that the power issue has the potential to put a hefty spanner in the works for any utility computing supplier.
And what about the networks required to deliver this ICT? There have already been several reports suggesting the internet may soon be teetering on the brink of collapse. I wrote about this last year, and even though I came to the conclusion that talk of imminent disaster is overblown, I couldn’t see then and can’t see now any evidence of really significant investment in the kind of high-speed optical fibre links necessary to support a global computing grid.
I tend to think a hybrid model will be the one adopted by most businesses. Firms will still need IT managers and there’ll still be something for technology journalists to write about unless they find out where St Pancras International datacentre is located.
