Modern Life: What is a data centre?
Richard Godwin
Do you wonder where all your data is kept? The information that companies have about you; the digital archive created by you; the content and marketing nominally created for you.
It’s not in the clouds, that’s for sure. The cloud – that nebulous euphemism – conceals a more prosaic reality: a lot of this information is stored on hard drives in data centres.
A data centre is a vast facility full of computer servers. There are 6,911 such facilities in the world, including 444 in the UK, according to cloudscene.com. Google alone spent £23 billion on data centres between 2014 and 2017. Its European facilities are in Ireland, Holland, Belgium and Finland. Google processes 20 petabytes of data each day, equivalent to 14.9 billion old-school floppy disks, and it has to go somewhere. Since Google owns Youtube, it’s a fair bet that its warehouse outside Dublin contains a lot of cat videos. But which data is sourced in which centre is anyone’s guess.
Facebook (which owns Instagram and Whatsapp) also owns a lot of data centres. Two years ago, it announced plans to double its capacity, as its machine-learning applications were requiring exponentially more computing resources. Facebook’s director of technology and strategy, Vijay Rao, has spoken of ‘hundreds of thousands of bots and assistants… making about 200 trillion predictions per day.’
Amazon is the biggest player, with 33 per cent of the ‘cloud’ (ie data centre) market. It makes a lot of its money by renting out its storage to other companies. Netflix’s entire database is stored by Amazon Web Services, for example. The CIA has a £450 million contract with Amazon too, according to Wikileaks.
Data centre technicians have an
unglamorous job compared with your Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezoses. They need to keep all those servers cool, and it takes a lot of energy to keep all those fans whirring (there are lots of data centres in deserts). That’s one reason why data is responsible for more global carbon emissions than the entire aviation industry. Google recently instructed its artificial intelligence division, Deepmind, to work on reducing energy consumption.
But it also requires a human touch. A senior technician at an Amazon data centre recently detailed a day in his life on the question and answer site, Quora. There are lots of security briefings (‘We are really serious when it comes to security’) and the occasional outage, such as the one that brought down Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp recently. But mostly it’s ‘break-fix tickets’: a bit of software that needs reconfiguring, say, or some fibre optics that need repairing.
Recruitment is an issue. We’re producing more and more data all the time – 90 per cent of all human data was created in 2017-18 – which will require
more data centre technicians. The talk in the industry is of ‘hyper-scaling’.
Meanwhile, the more data we create, the more space it will take up, and the more the big tech companies will start to resemble real estate companies.
Some fear that data centres will end up displacing human buildings, like houses and libraries. We will become hoarders, shuffling around ever tighter spaces, entombed by our own information.