Category Archives: ‘Cloud’ computing

Microsoft’s move to the cloud continues

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From Nicholas Carr’s blog…

I’ve received a few more hints about the big cloud-computing initiative Microsoft may be about to announce, perhaps during the company’s Mix08 conference in Las Vegas this coming week. One of the cornerstones of the strategy, I’ve heard, will be an aggressive acceleration of the company’s investment in its data center network. The construction program will be “totally over the top,” said a person briefed on the plan. The first phase of the buildout, said the source, will include the construction of about two dozen data centers around the world, each covering about 500,000 square feet or more. The timing of the construction is unclear…

Data smelting

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Slight Economist article on the energy demands of cloud computing…

AS ONE industry falls, another rises. The banks of the Columbia River in Oregon used to be lined with aluminium smelters. Now they are starting to house what might, for want of a better phrase, be called data smelters. The largest has been installed by Google in a city called The Dalles. Microsoft and Yahoo! are not far behind. Google’s plant consumes as much power as a town of 200,000 people. And that is why it is there in the first place. The cheap hydroelectricity provided by the Columbia River, which once split apart aluminium oxide in order to supply the world with soft-drinks cans and milk-bottle tops, is now being used to shuffle and store masses of information. Computing is an energy-intensive industry. And the world’s biggest internet companies are huge energy consumers—so big that they are contemplating some serious re-engineering in order to curb their demand…

Strangely, it makes no mention of virtualisation.

Why the cloud might not have a silver lining

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This morning’s Observer column…

Many people believe that cloud computing is the logical next step for the industry. It’s the proposition on which the vast Google ranch has been wagered. (It’s also the reason why Microsoft – a platform-based company – is so eager to acquire Yahoo.) The prominent technology commentator Nicholas Carr has just published a book called The Big Switch in which he argues that what’s happening to computing now is analogous to what happened to electricity generation a century ago. Once upon a time, every industrial firm had its own generator; but eventually organisations plugged into a grid with cheap electricity pumped out by specialist generating companies. Something similar, Carr claims, is happening now to computing: it’s becoming a public utility, rather than a service that firms provide for themselves…

On the slide

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Microsoft has announced that it’s cutting the retail price of some versions of Vista. Here’s Nick Carr’s take on it:

The real threat to Microsoft has always been that the battle would shift away from its turf, that its traditional hegemony over the PC would begin to matter less. The threat, in other words, wasn’t so much that Microsoft would lose its control over the operating system and the personal productivity application, control reflected in market share numbers, but that its control would simply fade in importance. And that phenomenon – the loss of importance – would be revealed through a loss of pricing power, not a loss of share.

That’s what we’re beginning to see today. At the edges of its vast and incredibly lucrative market, Microsoft is losing pricing power. As the center of personal computing moves from the PC hard drive to the web, people’s reliance on Windows and Office begins, slowly, to fade, and as a result their motivation to buy or upgrade the programs weakens. To maintain its market share, Microsoft has no alternative but to cut prices…

Second Life: First World energy consumption

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Nick Carr has a post in which he uses some data supplied by Linden Labs (proprietors of Second Life) to show that an avatar in that benighted corner of cyberspace consumes as much electricity as the average Brazilian.

If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars “living” in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars’ physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals:

(4,000 x 250 x 24) (12,500 x 120 x 24) = 60,000,000 watt-hours or 60,000 kilowatt-hours

Per capita, that’s:

60,000 / 12,500 = 4.8 kWh

Which, annualized, gives us 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they’re in the same ballpark.

I have some good friends who are dedicated environmental campaigners, but who are also evangelical about the potential of Second Life. I wonder what they think about the energy issue.

And, just to be fair, everything that applies to Second Life’s energy consumption applies to cloud computing generally.