The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

The rise of IT server farms brings us back, full circle, to the beginnings of the industrial revolution

 Further to my entry of November 6, I read another interesting article on large IT server farms in the October issue of WIRED Magazine: “The Information Factories”, by George Gilder.

 The article describes the latest server farm being built by Google in The Dalles, Oregon. You have to read it if you are interested by the progress in computers, data storage systems and high-speed communications; the units used are petabytes and petabits per second. Yet, what fascinated me is the choice of this remote location as site for the farm. Gilder’s description looks like the script of a Sergio Leone movie. However, this remote valley of Oregon was selected for two reasons that have little to do with its Far West landscape: [1] Input: energy - the availability of cheap electrical power and [2] Output: distribution channels - the proximity of an ultra-fast fibre-optic communications hub.

 The Columbia River Gorge is locked by a half-mile long dam that feeds a 1.8-gigawatt power plant, once essential to aluminium smelting. Its electricity is charged at about a fifth of what it would cost in San Francisco. This will represent huge savings for Google when a million (or so) servers will populate the farm. The second selection criteria, a 640Gbps hub linked to the costal fibre-optic superhighway, is as critical for it makes this fantastic computing power easily accessible from anywhere in the world. 

Now, flash back to the 18^th century. Emerging factories are located as close as possible to sources of cheap energy, initially water mills on rivers with a high rate of flow. In additions, the factories must also benefit from efficient distribution channels for the goods they produce, first the canals and then the railroads. What a coincidence!

So, although the term ‘server farm’ suggests some bucolic comeback to the agricultural age, we’re brought back, full circle to the industrial age, but not necessarily to the smokestacks of the past. Maybe most server farms will be built in valleys, canyons and gorges close to mountains and amid ‘real’ animal farms so that the few technicians in charge of the IT monsters will see cows grazing in the nearby fields, like in the picture illustrating the WIRED article.

Maybe my home country, Switzerland, will see a high concentration of IT power taking advantage of all hydro-electric plants installed in the Alps (and the Swiss cowboys will yodel Yahooooooooooooooo while checking the wholesale price of milk on their Blackberries ;-).