Most people don't think of it this way, but the Information Age is being built on an infrastructure as imposing as the factories and mills of yore. Think of all the things people have been using the Internet for--all the e-mails, blogs, photos, videogames, movies, TV shows.
None of those bits and bytes simply float off into the ether, magically arriving at their assigned destinations. Storing, processing, and moving them all is heavy, heavy lifting. And the work is performed by tens of millions of computers known as servers, all packed into data centers around the world.
The industry term for the vast rooms full of humming, blinking computers inside each of these complexes is "server farms," but "work camps" would be more accurate. Consider that every time you conduct a web search on one of Yahoo's sites, for example, you activate roughly 7,000 or more computers--and that doesn't count at least 15,000 others that support every query by constantly poking around the Net for updates.
"When you go to certain parts of a data center, it looks much more like a factory than something high-tech," says Urs Hölzle, a senior vice president of operations at Google.
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Software is becoming webified: Computer programs that traditionally have been installed on personal computers--from simple word processing and e-mail to heavy-duty applications that help companies manage payroll--are going online. (Bye-bye to CD-ROMs and 300-page installation manuals.)
The transition is fraught with challenges: Instead of collecting big upfront payments for software, for example, services companies subsist on subscription revenue that trickles in slowly over a longer period of time. But the biggest challenge lies in building and maintaining the kind of physical infrastructure needed to distribute software, games, and other content--plus storage--via the Net.
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"A couple of years ago I would measure a data center in square footage," Chrapaty says. "Now I look at megawatts of power. It is a new way of measuring technology."
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The Google facility will contain some of the estimated half-million to one million (only Google knows for sure) servers that the company operates to handle 2.7 billion online searches a month, its Gmail service, and other applications. Experts figure such a project easily could run north of $150 million; Google, of course, isn't saying. Analysts expect that the three companies combined will devote roughly $4.7 billion to capital expenditures this year, double 2005 levels.
Then there's the enormous cost of operating these things. New and improved microchips that can process more data mean that standard-sized servers can do a lot more than their ancestors did, but the newest gear also throws off more heat. And that means cranking up the air conditioning to make sure the computers don't literally melt themselves into slag.
Vericenter, an operator of data centers, says a rack of "blade" servers can get as hot as a seven-foot tower of toaster ovens. It gets hot enough that for every dollar a company spends to power a typical server, it spends another dollar on a/c to keep it cool. No wonder Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft all are building their server farms in the Pacific Northwest, near hydroelectric power plants selling cheap electricity.
"If I saved just $10 in the operation of each of those servers, that's $10 million per year," says Greg Papadopolous, chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems. "So how much would you be willing to invest in order to save $10 per server? This is exactly the discussion companies had around the time of the Industrial Revolution."
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