The prospect of outsourcing servers and storage to the cloud has an irresistible lure of operational simplicity and cash efficiency for today’s application developers. Cloud computing vendors help operate social networking applications, micro-blogging sites, global gaming networks and a plethora of applications that we use everyday. Yet, as successful and economically desirable as clouds have been for many organizations, outsourcing servers and storage causes a serious emotional and operational dilemma for the hardened breed of systems administrators called server huggers.
Everyone working in and around the Internet knows a server hugger. Server huggers relish spending time in air-conditioned data centers, sitting on raised floors under florescent lighting with a laptop connected to a console port of a server (or, if they are lucky, standing against a server rack using a dedicated terminal and a slide-out keyboard tray). They spend hours staring at command-line on a terminal and at notebooks of commands, passwords and IP addresses…
But server huggers face an impending crisis — the data centers that host their servers in many large metropolitan areas such as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco are increasingly filled. It is unfulfilling to hug a server that sits in a cardboard box because there is no rack space left in a data center, so server huggers have been scrambling to put their servers in geographically desirable locations that do not require new construction or an exorbitant budget.And that got me thinking: Does the data center of the future look like a mobile home park? A mobile home park provides a place for you to park a single-wide or double-wide home and some basic utilities — power, roads, mail, etc. Yet, unlike seemingly every person on the Jerry Springer Show, servers do not operate well in mobile homes. However, as Microsoft, HP, Verari and others have shown, high density blade servers can be packed with hundreds of terabytes of storage, cooled and operated efficiently inside standard shipping containers. Maybe instead of more metropolitan data centers for the server huggers, we need container parks.
There are questions to be asked; but they are the same ones you’d ask before siting a permanent structure. And this solution has the advantage of mobility.
The author of this “article” is a Tech VC guy who has $ dumped into “cloud” companies…
Nice, “sky is falling” story though…
Oh my word! I’m trying to read this blog article and a flashy gaudy ad DECLARING!!!!! a won a free laptop is making it absolutely impossible.
re:flashy gaudy ad DECLARING!!!!! WHERE? I don’t see anything like that. then again,I’m using Firefox
@Earle
Firefox and Adblock are the best things since punch cards fo shizzle.
I bet it’s very easy to lit those trailer parks on fire.
What about tornado or hurricanes or flood or what have you…
Trailer park data centers. Nice idea but it will never happen.
Why? Electricity. By the author’s very premise, these trailer parks would be camped near the server hugger’s business, which is in a metropolitan already too cramped for expansion. This means that the business is already in an area which certainly has higher cost electricity due to local demand.
Look where Google and others put their data centers. Near cheap power. It’s much less expensive to have the servers near cheap power and bring the internet to the servers than the other way around.
So while the server hugger would love to have an additional center in the parking lot, management couldn’t justify the costs just in electricity alone.
A trailer server center might be useful for places where thehy’re needed rarely. Think of the Olympics, the Super Bowl, big time auto races like Indycar, Nascar or Grand Prix and so forth
I just hugged my servers – no, nothing there.
Data Centers being built in Russia, where the have cheap hydro-power electricity and lots of arctic weather – makes cooling easy – just open the door !!! M$ in the vanguard here !!!
#10,
Yup, there you go!
I wouldn’t be surprised if Norway got into the act in a big way either.
Real smart, they drive and it crashes the hard drives. The driver wrecks the truck and you lose your data center.
Pffft. I’ll wait to form a decision on whether it’s a good idea or not after somebody OTHER THAN a VC pimp trying to pump up the value of his investment writes about it.
“Mr. Leinwand is a venture partner in the firm and focuses on technology investments. Prior to this role, he joined JPMorgan Partners as an operating partner in 2004. From 2001 to 2004, he was President and Co-founder of Proficient Networks, Inc. From 2000 to 2001, he was Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering at Telegis Networks, Inc. .”
#7,
CORRECT, thats why its in the MIDDLE of nowhere, and remotely used..ALL you need/want is High speed access, and data burst.
Iv discussed this with a few friends..
Server farms for DATA/SITE/.. backup..
For security/safety/fires, having a REMOTe is great.
Add to that GAME servers, and a training center to TEACH person HOW to program and run computers/servers..
Also i have started checking for sites.. AND NOT IN THE USA is a good choice.
You need POWER/HIGH SPEED ACCESS/GOOD/CHEAP LOCATION..
In general, interesting idea but I agree that it seems more like a solution in search of a problem. I REALLY haven’t heard anything about data center space shortages yet. Most sites I know of have been reducing the necessary space needed as computers get more powerful and can do more in less space and with less power. This moderates the impact of the general internet growth. Add to that how lucrative data centers are (they make a LOT more than $1000 per square foot) and I think you’ll find it’s really not a problem.
So you have a solution that creates a LOT more problems than the non-existent problem it solves…
Cloud computing has more horror stories than B movies.
As soon as I saw the phrase “server hugger” I know the author had an agenda. Hmmm, server hugger; sounds like a noble vocation…
Here’s a tip o’ the hat to all you server huggers out there — may all your bits be good ones!
# 14 ECA said, “Also i have started checking for sites.. AND NOT IN THE USA is a good choice.
You need POWER/HIGH SPEED ACCESS/GOOD/CHEAP LOCATION..”
LOL!
Yes, I want my hot backup site 5000 miles away from my office & staff.