Innovation in Software

Whilst I’ve worked in data centres before – and am all too familiar with how hot, noisy, industrial and dangerous they can be – I sometimes forget how the software industry I now work in has an industrial footprint in those rooms. It’s easy to think of my business as being ‘clean’, because the dirt is so well hidden.

Plans for Google’s new data centre in Dalles, as the blueprints published by Harper’s shows, should remind us just how industrial our business really is.

Combined with the annotation by Ginger Strand, we get a picture of how big this data centre is. Three buildings of over 68,000 square foot each and electricity consumption equivalent to that needed to power 82,000 homes, a third of which will be used just to keep the building temperature at a reasonable level.

Thanks to its location much of the energy used every day will be supplied via hydroelectric power, however its very existence has caused other technology firms to up their data centre spending, and it’s unlikely all of that capacity will be run on renewable power. And besides, every watt of clean energy powering a server is a watt not powering a domestic home.

It’s also worth remembering this isn’t “the” Google data centre. It’s “a” Google data centre.

For years now they have been pushing racks into peering sites and DCs around the globe as well as smaller facilities of their own – an estimated million servers are out there running Google sites, and there are more data centres planned by Google and their competitors over the next four years. Already data centres consume more power in the United States than the army of some 100-million-plus American monster-sized televisions. As the magazine itself says, the Web “is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.”

Better virtualisation of servers is going to help, but there’s a limit to how much you can virtualise. Is the time now right for us to get smarter again about how we use clock cycles? Is the efficiency-first stance of programming we’ve consigned to the era of the 8-bit machine now going to become fashionable again?

Maybe though, we could do a little to educate the public to make use of this vast industry a little more efficiently. Does the quest for the top 100 current hot trends at Google really suggest that we’re using this power wisely?

Via RoughType

For the last few years I’ve been involved in the co-ordination around the Manchester BSD User Group meetings (first Tuesday of the month, Briton’s Protection, Great Bridgewater Street), because I’ve been so heavily involved in running BSD systems over the years. In fact, I think this Summer marks the 9th year of me running BSD kit. In Unix terms that makes me a baby, but back then many of us were still running FreeBSD 2.x which would make the current crop of young admins nauseous. No package management, no easy deployment, lots of fiddling with drivers to get things working: it was real frontier land back then.

However, due to server consolidation and the fact that the cost of dedicated servers in the UK with FreeBSD are either not an option or prohibitively expensive, something bad just happened:

I no longer admin any BSD machines.

This site is now on a Debian server, and is likely to remain so for some time. All of my current projects deploy out to Linux boxes (some of them in unusual corners of the globe). The closest I can get is that the machine I’m writing this on is OS X which has FreeBSD userland under the skin.

Somehow this bothers me more than I thought it should. BSD (specifically FreeBSD) has been a staunch and loyal friend over the years to me, and without it my work would have been harder, less enjoyable and I wouldn’t have met some of the amazing people I have over the years through the BSD scene.

I expect in about 12 months I’ll be in a position to be buying new hardware of my own rather than leasing somebody else’s kit, but by then I expect it’ll be more economical to be on an elastic cloud based on Xen than it will be to own my own iron in a data centre. Even if it makes sense to own the iron, there is a good chance I might be going down the Solaris route as I like some of the virtualisation work they’re doing. In other words, I’m not sure if BSD is in my future outside of a hobby interest.

For now then, I’ll still be going to the BSD meets, and I’ll probably even try and keep a box running somewhere so I can track -CURRENT, but today is a sad day for me: I don’t know the next time I’ll cvsup the ports tree and portupgrade. I don’t know the next time I’ll be thankful for the sane and consistent documentation of the system I’m using. I don’t know the next time I’ll feel like I’m using a real Unix built by real Unix people.

What I do know is that I’ll always think of the BSD distros out there as the best open source Unix on the planet, and the people working on them as the best developers bar none. Thanks to all of them for their hard work and keeping me entertained whilst earning my rent for the last decade.