Deprecating the Datacenter?

m0smithslash writes "The blogging CEO asserts that that datacenters are doomed. Computers are showing up in everything from drill bits, to cargo ships to tracking devices in stuffed animals at Disneyland. With computers becoming so small and easy to distribute over a wireless network, do we really need data centers to house computers or are the computers going to be placed where they are really needed?"

Comments

Missing info

[nizo]

How many drill bits will I need to buy for the company toolbox to run our email service? And does anyone know where I can get a toolbox with redundant power and cooling? Thanks.

Huh?

[yagu]

With more and more embedded computers, and easier and faster networks, datacenters could become more important than ever. Many trends today require expanding and larger datacenters -- how do you think Web 2.0 applications manage their data.

I wouldn't find it terribly surprising to find things like drill bits and their "computers" relaying performance data which eventually ends up in some manufacturers datacenter. What better way to determine the use, reliability, and performance of a product?

I also could imagine the information in datacenters spawning meta-datacenters where data mining and other analysis is performed.

Distributed computers and distributed computing are different animals. Datacenters will go away much like the disappearance of the world of mainframes (which, btw, was predicted and discussed as early as 1983 (by my experience)).

Re: Huh?

[kfg]

With more and more embedded computers, and easier and faster networks, datacenters could become more important than ever.

Bingo! Just as with more and more books being more widely distributed the need for public libraries as a central repository grows, not shrinks.

Now the fact is that most datacenters, as they are spoke, are almost literal clusterfucks, but it is most often because the data technology clueless CEOs make decisions about issues they know nothing about. Even relying on the technologists no longer works in most cases, because most of the technologists are now "trained" at the bequest of . . .CEOs, who belittle "theory" in favor of "pragmatism."

So how clueless is this particular CEO? Let us examine the record:

". . .the feature most requested by buyers in their fastest growing geography (India) was an LED flashlight. Edison would never have guessed (obviously). Nor that electricity would one day be on airplanes, lunar landers or deep sea submarines. "

The fuck he wouldn't have. Edison made flashlight bulbs, batteries and portable generators: a novel was published (perhaps you've heard of it) in 1870, when Edison was only 23 years old, that had an electric submarine as its primary subject. Edison built submarine engines and electric generators for WWI. The First Men in the Moon was published in 1901, the protagonists relaying their situation back to Earth by radio; and it became a commerical movie, using Edison technology, in 1919, more than a decade before Edison's death.

Good Lord, Edison not only guessed these things, he was instrumental in making them happen. That's why we know his name.

I don't care what company Schwartz is the CEO of (how are they doing, by the way?), he's either clueless, selling something . . .or both.

KFG

He's right!

[rlp]

As long as you're not concerned about minor issues like physical security, data and communications security, maintainability, scalability, and availability.

Security

[QuietLagoon]

Security requires control and restriction of physical access. Unless and until you can secure those drill bits, security will always be an issue.

Simplistic answer

[The-Bus]

No, data centers aren't doomed. They are only doomed if they fail to see this change and don't adapt to it. Sure, the types of data centers we saw 10 or 20 years ago may be rare relics in 2020; that doesn't mean data center businesses will be gone. Current centers need to focus on security, ease of storage, or whatever else is important to their customers. These values will go beyond the spec sheet of what type of servers you have. In two years or in ten years, the servers and technology will be different. The value you provide, hopefully, will not.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Exact opposite

[wamatt]

From what I've seen in the datacenter sector is growly rapidly. More and more data is being stored online in server farms. Online apps are more prevalent than ever (eg Gmail).

With ever increasing network capacity data storage on the PC will become redundant.

Re:Uh

[jdray]

How boring is that?

Re:Uh

[drinkypoo]

Your comment is both insightful and penetrating.

Central power generation is doomed...

[Dr. Zowie]

... with internal combustion engines so small and easy to implement, they're showing up in personal vehicles and even handheld devices like weed-whackers. There's no reason to build all that infrastructure of central powerplants any more -- anyone who wants electricity can just run a small motor to generate it locally.

Come on, get real folks.

Paper is for old people

[brunes69]

Seriously - I am 26, and I use a pen to write something on paper perhaps once every 3-4 days. I also use the printer at my office or home maybe once every 3 weeks at the most.

Any time I have to do something over the phone or by mail, that I know as a programmer I could be easily be doing online, it pisses me off to no end.

I know I am not in an uncommon age group either. As I see my nieces and nephews go through school, they use less and less books. They hand in their assignments in USB keys.

The only people I know of who use paper in any amount are people who are 40+, the type of people who like to print off any website longer than a page because "it is easier to read". How is reading paper easier on the eyes than reading a TFT LCD? Answer? it isn't - it's all psycological.

The whole "myth" of the paperless world is not a myth, it was just misconstrued - you can't create a paperless world until all the people who are used to using the paper everyday are gone.

Re:Paper is for old people

[patrixmyth]

I'm a few years from your 40+ old cut-off, but I still want to speak up and disagree with you. If you've bought a car or a house, joined a gym, graduated from college or been married, then you should be well aware of the importance of physical representations of data. It's great to be able to look up facts on wikipedia, but do I trust my military records to the digital archive? No. Is that because of my age? No. It's because of my experience. My parents have albums that they no longer can listen to, because they don't own a record player. I have lost touch with friends for months at a time when my cell phone died and took their numbers with it. I have gone to a store to show them a cancelled check that their computer system claimed they never cashed (after my bank's dispute resolution process had sided with them.) I can keep going with examples, some of them from wartime experience where 3 guys standing around a six year old map have saved hundreds of lives. Historians are studying written documents that are thousands of years old. We will only be a paperless (or vellumless, parchment, etc) society when a more reliable form of data storage is available. That day is a LONG WAY off.

Re:Paper is for old people

[phil reed]

How is reading paper easier on the eyes than reading a TFT LCD?

Depends. Is the power on?

Ironic

[databank]

It's ironic that a CEO would have issues with considering a datacenter that is designed for centralization and management considered to be anachronistic. A datacenter will always be needed for centralization and management.

Hey, while we're at it, what do we need a CEO for? Overall intelligence has gone up over the years. I'm sure we're going to evolve to the point that we won't need a CEO anymore. After all, any one of us can do the job just as effectively, right? Let's hear it for true distributed management!

Paper's for the thoughtless and lazy.

[Kadin2048]

I agree, but I think at least right now, for every person who's like us, there's some asshole out there who insists on printing out 60+ pages of single-sided PowerPoint slides and distributing them to everyone in the audience at their presentation, because it's "the thing to do." Sure, 90% of them end up in the trash near the door within five minutes of the end, but they do it anyway. Somebody might want them, right? (And this is in an office where everyone -- down to the last clerk and secretary -- has a computer and an email address, and where the presenter probably sent the meeting invite via email and thus has the entire distribution list already.)

Computers made it easier to use up paper thoughtlessly. While going to the Xerox machine and photocopying a 100 page document at least requires you to stand there while it prints, you can print a 100-page Word document pretty much by accident. I know people that make a point of just printing entire 40+ page specification drafts when they only need a page or two, because "it's faster to just print it and pull the pages out later than figure out which I want." There no way they would be that cavalier about it, if printing required more than a "Control-P, Enter", and then picking up the sheaf of output the next time they're headed out to the water cooler.

People aren't logical. People are dumb. People are thoughtless. Computers make being thoughtless easier. When you make something wasteful easier, it happens more often.