That exact argument could be made against disaster recovery data centers. Why bother building a new data center and buying two servers when you could just have one and save tons of money?
Co-lo for a single server is not practical if you are relying on the datacenter techs for repair/replacement. When it's their own hardware and the have hundreds (or thousands) of identical systems, much easier/cheaper.
"It is cheaper to design a system that must be up which accounts for a data center being totally down and a portion of the system being totally unavailable than to add more datacenter mitigations."
Citation needed - the same issue with testing, data races and expensive bandwidth come up.
I agree with you in principle, but then we're giving up the redundancy and safety offered by multiple data centers. The cost also comes down at cloud scale so that you're only paying a few dollars a month instead of large up front purchases.
There's also a technical hurtle for the average person. Are they going to manually sync all their data from devices every time?
I don’t know that massive datacenters are truly a good investment for my employer, but at least we have several zones in two regions in case of power/network/natural disaster issues.
> They made sense in a world of dialup and low speed / high latency broadband. But there are lots of places with high speed fibre and not much latency to the peering points.
Yes, but then you need backup power, someone to replace disks / hardware if things break, proper security for compliance reasons, cooling, noise. Once you set up all these things you just invented a data center again.
I don't see how getting rid of data centers makes any sense.
Who told you they need to build a massive data center? They are NOT RENTING SERVERS but buying space for the ones they use.
With the budget they can afford to buy super beefy rack servers that occupy no space. With a single rack they can have a ton of late tech servers.
Running a data center comes with its own challenges. I imagine they don't want to be in the business of running data centers. Additionally running only 1 might have too much overhead.
Nobody needs more data centers, except for people trying to build their empires.
People need services and data centers are how they get them. If data centers are expensive then I invest in efficiency work because 3 FTEs are cheaper than 2 additional data centers. If the centers are cheaper I will just burn watts to solve my problem, and spend those employees on something else.
A real datacenter is almost certainly Better Than You at reliability. Consider:
- Redundant fiber connections to multiple independent ISPs
- Battery backup and generator failover
- Redundant HVAC
- Waterless fire suppression
- 24x7 staff presence
- Security systems and personnel
These are all economies of scale. If you're just running a couple of racks you're either throwing away money by paying for all this or making yourself irresponsibly vulnerable to things that can and will go wrong.
I don't think he was making an argument for ease of maintenance, but rather, reliability per dollar. Even if you've got two crappy datacenters, you're at least redundantly crappy.
From my very superficial reading of the article it would seem like the win is that you're getting huge amounts of density.
I think their argument is that a typical web-style datacenter is throwing up hundreds and hundreds of commodity servers to do some sort of distributed processing tasks (think of something like a hadoop cluster or a ton of app servers behind a load balancer).
With this setup their argument may be you're no longer in need of a giant network/switching infrastructure to do these types of compute tasks. Plus all the power/cost savings of only needing a couple boxes just to get those thousands of CPUs. I wonder what kind of RAM these things are going to have, as obviously that's pretty crucial.
But yeah, losing one of these things would cause more than a little headache of an outage. Seems like an interesting approach that's worth more thought though.
My thinking was, if they already own a datacenter in another location, why not add another floor? Obviously it's not cheap but is it really 2x? If you're big enough, you don't have to hire double the staff or buy double the resources since you already have them.
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