Deprecating the Datacenter? 367
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?"
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)).
Security (Score:5, Insightful)
Simplistic answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
how do we reconcile this with the "thin client"? (Score:2, Insightful)
DUH! (Score:2, Insightful)
What happened? every time you have a network leg go down that office ore offices are 100% dead. no printing, no files , no services. network problems went up 50 fold and all pipes had to be increased because instead of having a BDC, print server and file server local, it was now 1/2 way across the country.
Large Datacenters have always been a stupid idea. distributing your services to locations around your offices is far more efficient and significantly lowers the connectivity needs. that T1 to denver works far better with 90% of the traffic now local to the LAN.
Stability and reliability (Score:3, Insightful)
Need I say more?
As for people walking around in MY data center? LOL!!! Please. Everyone in here is wearing monkey suits. Key card on a plastic necklace and nothing in their pockets except maintenance equipment from the internal shed. Cords go under the floor or through protected pipes into the ceiling - if he ran a data center he'd know that. Our procedures for changing out a computer and making sure something is there to stand in its stead in the mean time is far too complex to discuss here, but "breaking something trying to fix it" is NOT a problem here.
Oh, the ignorance. It's so great it has its own gravity field!
And... (Score:2, Insightful)
Unintelligent Article (Score:3, Insightful)
Central power generation is doomed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on, get real folks.
Re:Missing info (Score:3, Insightful)
The future isn't what it was predicted to be, and this is just another prediction. I noticed this in the article - "Perhaps a more interesting question should be - why bother with datacenters at all? Surely it's time we all started revisiting some basic assumptions..."
Of course, the author then fails to do that; maybe in his next "blog". This is a throwaway article trying to sound "visionary".
Hello computer (Score:2, Insightful)
A datacenter is for collecting large amounts of data, running operations on that data and providing that data to others. For instance, there is no way that a small handheld device at the loading docks can store the entire inventory for the company over the past 10 years. It can maybe keep a record of the last 30 days, maybe. And even if it were, how would that device let the main office, over 200 miles away know that the cargo has arrived at the docks? How would this CEO be able to find out how many widgets arrive annualy during the month of October and get the average price on them? The answer is that he wouldn't get it from a small handheld device.
This reminds me of when Scotty said "Hello computer" to the mouse. This guy clearly doesn't understand IT. I sure hope they have a good IT department to keep this guy from sinking the company.
Paper is for old people (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Ironic (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
APPS run locally. Data? On the network. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that as network availability and bandwidth increase we'll see larger computing centers with smaller (physically) and more ubiquitous clients.
No need for datacenter to go away -- just change a bit.
Paper's for the thoughtless and lazy. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Corporate control of data (Score:3, Insightful)
After reading the blog, I'm not really following his theories.
His networked drill bits, are sensors at the tip of HUGE deep sea oil rigs. That's not my happy 24 volt cordless drill. It's financially sound to stick a few thousand dollars of sensors on the end of something that can make you millions.
As for data centers going away? It sounds more like he's saying the large hoards of mainframe operators are going away?
True. Most of them have. Or have been centralized into ginormous data centers hosting boxes for tons of companies. (IBM's huge computer rooms come to mind. I know there are quite a few companies in the one I have to go to regularly)
But as for getting rid of centralized servers?
Insane. Thanks to SOX (bleh *#@(#(*@# etc etc) IT groups are being hit with requirements to control more and more data. We need to keep stricter tabs on everything. NOT farm more and more of the computing out. With things like the DAV laptops getting stolen, there should be a push for MORE centralized servers/file storage and FORCE the users to keep all the data up on controlled servers. I KNOW that my servers, inside of my network, behind my firewalls, etc etc are safer than Jimmy the sales guys laptop that he forgot sitting on the table at Starbucks for the 100th time. (Or the nifty Irish pub that has free wifi. But they're pretty good about remembering you and holding your lappie for you.
About all the data I keep on my local laptop is a contact list of phone numbers, and a pst file. My email might be amusing to someone? But if they REALLY want to see the 32423423423 backup notifications and all trouble ticket notifications, they have more free time than I have.
In summary, if the guy is saying centralized servers/file storage is going away, he's wrong. If he's just saying the hordes of mainframe operators are going away, then yea, he's probably close to accurate. Or at least getting congregated into larger facilities where fewer people manage more boxes.
(BTW sorry for the completely incoherent path this took, to much allergy medicine)
Re:Paper is for old people (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 . .
So how clueless is this particular CEO? Let us examine the record:
". .
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 . .
KFG
Re:Paper is for old people (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun Logo? (Score:3, Insightful)
An interesting question would be "Hey Sun, do YOU still have a data center?" Of course they do.
All in your perspective. (Score:3, Insightful)
If taken to the extreme -- and I'm not sure that it will -- a user might actually use applications which reside in any number of large datacenters. So while there is a lot of centralization, during the course of a day, a single user might request data from several locations. I.e., use GMail from Google's datacenter, then Flickr from Yahoo's, then some Citrix-delivered stuff from a coloed blade system that their company pays for...they're using datacenters, but from their perspective they're less centralized than they were before, when all of their work would be done locally.
So it's sort of as if we're centralizing some things while decentralizing others at the same time.
Re:Paper's for the thoughtless and lazy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Power Point does NOT by default enhance your presentation. In fact, the vast majority of PP "enabled" presentations I've seen have sucked because the speaker simply read off the slides; this means either the slides would have been better off as a Word document because they're so wordy, or the speech is more of an outline. Write your speech, THEN make your slides to match your speech.
If you're going to give a handout, copy the text of your slides into an outline format. It won't take ten minutes to give people the same information in two pages that they're going to see in twenty slides. Why waste paper?
That said, I like paper. I like being able to quickly sketch out ideas--especially small flow charts and layouts and the like--and can put information together faster on paper than I can with a computer. If I have to write more than a few sentences I turn to my computer and I don't use paper for anything I plan to keep (yay for Google Desktop's scratch pad), but for brainstorming paper is where it's at.
Re:Missing info (Score:3, Insightful)
It's important to note that even if something becomes possible, it doesn't mean that such a thing will immediately become prevalent. It took 50 or more years for electricity to go from a novelty to a commodity. Think about the amount of time between Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press and the commoditization of the written word. People have to get used to the way society changes as a result of technology. There will always be some element of a society distrustful or resentful of the changes brought about by technology, but as those elements slowly pass on there will be less resistance.
In the case of the datacenter, I can accept this man's prediction, but I doubt that they will all disappear within the next 10 or even 20 years. Rather, when networks become truly wireless and when computing technology becomes completely integral in our daily lives, we will have little need for data centers, except in major corporations and in areas where the security of the data in question would be compromised by the transmission.
I'd like to point out that computers haven't even become commodity products. When they become so inexpensive that the vast majority of people need no financial assitance to buy one, then they will be a commodity.
Re:Missing info (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever heard of a NOC? The reason this guy's wrong has nothing to do with computing power, it's got to do with security.
If you RTFA carefully, he's not talking about removing network operations or centralized communications and data spots. He's talking about downgrading datacenters to the level of a fusebox. The fusebox for a house is in one place, but it's in the garage. The datacenter will be in one place, but not the center of downtown.
One could say that this has already happened quite often with IT outsourcing. You don't have a server farm just about anyone could run located in downtown Manhatten. You have it in Hyderabad or Mumbai or some rural spot in central China. Until the forces of market equalization pan out in ten or a hundred years.
The assumptions I disagree with here are:
1. There will never be the requirement for high-end enough services that the regular 'datacenter' with shiny equipment won't be an excessively useful sales tool.
2. Uptime requires little enough on-site time for the people who really know what they're doing to be far enough away from the servers that they can be located in the middle of nowhere. (This is debatable today. Five years, well, it won't be debatable, it will be a fact that they require this little onsite time.)
3. Off-Siting is easy enough to implement organizationally while retaining flexibility. This is going to be especially true for small companies.
Other than that, though, the skills required for good operations center management are not going to be as available in the middle of nowhere as they are in cities for quite a while yet. The real problem is that the people that are willing to learn enough about the stuff are (and this is a broad and unqualified generalization) generally attracted to cities for the availability of stimulation / excess input.
Re:Paper is for old people (Score:3, Insightful)
While it will take awhile to prove, I suspect that digital representations can be more reliable and less forgeable than paper. The problem is, computers are some of the most mishandled tools around.
I wouldn't trust paper either if clueless people were always accidentally burning them ("I thought you could set a book down anywhere! How was I to know the stove would burn it?"), storing them in cool, wet places ("Oh, you meant a cool, dry place?"), using important documents for scratch paper or making paper hats out of them... You get the idea.
Reliable computer storage is pretty much here, for those who care to use it. The problem is not that computers are so unreliable, or even that Windows is so insecure. The problem is that most people have plenty of education surrounding other aspects of their life -- they are required to learn arithmetic and geography in school, they need to pass Driver's Ed to get a license. Nobody uses a paper filing system without having some idea of what's going on, and paper filing systems are generally redundant. But we are not required to take a class on basic computer usage, that explains things like the necessity to keep backups, or when not to reflexively hit "OK".
So, reliable computers are easily possible. Reliable users are a long way off.
Re:Paper is for old people (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmmm. Let's see what I've printed off recently..
- A couple of pages from a work order so I can take them into the racks with me - I want to connect everything correctly.
- Some sheet music. Because that laptop doesn't fit on my music stand.
- A floor plan, so that I can take it with me to the room it describes and mark the plan up as I measure the *real* dimentions of things around the room. (sure, I could take a laptop with me for this, but it's not nearly as portable).
- An article or 2 to read on the bus (or in the shitter)
Easier to read doesn't always mean "easier on the eyes". It's not easy to read something if it isn't where you are doing the reading.
Wrong conclusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Testify, brother! (Powerpoint) (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd just like to add that I wasn't ranting against paper in general -- I take lots of notes on paper during presentations. I use either spiral-bound notebooks or legal pads, generally, and I find them both essential parts of my organizational/creative process. I'm still waiting on an electronic note-taking system that's as versatile as a spiral-bound notebook and a 0.07mm pen or pencil, in terms of quickly inputting high-resolution text and graphics.
However, in general I've found that each PP slide, which done according to the seemingly near-universal business-template "style" (which only has a few words of text on it!), only boils down to about one line of written notes. Thus, a 60-slide presentation might only take up a page or two of notes, plus diagrams and editorial comments as appropriate.
There's so much wrong with PP presentations that I don't even want to get started on it; most people who use them are really using them like a backwards-facing teleprompter, rather than a visual aid, and giving out tons of handouts encourages people to not take notes, meaning less retention of information. Powerpoint is a service by the lazy (presenters) for the lazy (audience).