Could the cornfields of Iowa give way to acres of servers? Probably not any time soon, but the growth of server farms is a trend that is likely to flourish for the foreseeable future.
Server farms – data centers that house thousands upon thousands of computer servers in buildings covering acres upon acres of land – are the result of our world’s increasing demand for data storage. And it isn’t just government and private sector businesses than need to store massive quantities of information. It’s also you and I, with our increasing love of and dependence on social media, streaming videos, and mobile devices. The data has to go somewhere. Those two or three computers stuck under the network admin’s desk or in the closet with the old metal file cabinets just can’t do the job.
So it’s no surprise that server farms are becoming one of the fastest growing areas of IT business. According to SmartMoney.com, the demand for server farms could increase by 14 percent this year, 16 percent in 2012. Clearly, server farms are a good investment.
Server farms do have some significant security issues. Of course, there’s the obvious danger of cyber attacks. But remember, data centers are actual physical entities, not merely “virtual” spaces. The buildings that house all of those racks and racks of servers are subject to the same dangers as any other physical structures: break-ins, natural disasters, power disruptions. You don’t need to hack into a computer to destroy the data. You can simply destroy the physical computer.
Many of the world’s largest companies clearly recognize these dangers and have proven very reticent about releasing information about their data center locations and numbers. According to some estimates, Google runs something in neighborhood of 450,000 servers; Microsoft , 300,000. No one really knows for sure. And those numbers are already a few years old and are probably changing rapidly as both giants add data centers.
Where are the best locations for server farms? Any place where energy is cheap. Over its lifetime, a computer that runs around the clock will consume electricity worth many times its initial cost. Power is more expensive than hardware.
About half of the electricity used to run server farms is needed for cooling. Iceland, and similar places, is taking advantage of that fact. With its year-round cold climate and cheap carbon-neutral geothermal electricity, Iceland is attracting attention from companies such as Google, which need to increase their server numbers as they increase their services. Finland, Switzerland, and Sweden are also prime locations for new data centers.
What does all this mean for the IT industry? It’s possible that network administrators may have trouble finding jobs at small organizations that have switched to cloud computing. But data centers will still need infrastructure engineers, operations managers, security experts, and network specialists.
If you’re a construction worker, server farms are great for you. Remember, somebody has to build all those massive structures to house Facebook’s new servers.