Telstra International – Where data lives
Filed under: business, cloud computing, corporate, International, internet, networks
There’s no mistaking it, whether you’re a student, teacher, doctor, management executive or full time parent – your everyday life is filled with online activity.
Beyond what you see on your computer screen, Blackberry or iPhone, where does this information live? Think about the sheer number of internet pages you visit each day – the videos, images and words – they have to be kept or stored somewhere?
To understand the magnitude our online activities are having on digital storage demands just look at your average daily routine. At the click of a mouse you load up the weekend’s party photos on Flickr; you run Google searches over and over; all while listening to some tracks streamed from BigPond Music or iTunes, and the list goes on – Blogspot, Twitter, YouTube.
In the UK, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) iPlayer allows you to catch up on your favourite BBC TV programs by either streaming or downloading to your laptop. With as many as 250 programs available at any one time and over 100 million download requests in December 2009, it takes more than a couple of computers sitting in the corner of the BBC offices to support the storage required to sustain the iPlayer service.
That’s where the mighty backbones of today’s business and society come into play – the data centre.
A data centre is where the internet lives. Or as Telstra International in the UK prefers to say; a data centre is where business lives. Telstra International recently invested into the expansion of its global data centre footprint in the UK, opening a multi-million dollar facility outside London. The new data centre is designed to meet the increasing demand for virtualised environments that support the world’s booming business and personal online habits.
The words ‘online’ and ‘boom’ certainly go hand in hand with Facebook. The site has grown into one of the largest on the Internet today, serving over 200 billion pages per month*. Formerly keeping quiet on the subject, last year Facebook disclosed the number of servers* (typically computers stacked in towers about 6-8 feet high and 3 feet wide) supporting its operations: 30,000. Facebook’s data centre servers would most likely store some of the 80 billion images on the sites with users uploading up to 600,000 photos a second*. Jeff Rothschild, the vice president of technology at Facebook indicated that the site manages more than 25 terabytes of data per day in logging information, which is the equivalent of about 1,000 times the volume of mail delivered daily by the United States Postal Service.
So what do these powerhouses look like?
To the naked eye they appear as ordinary buildings, often resembling warehouses. Upon closer inspection, the military style perimeter security is the first indication that something of significant value lies within. Alongside the building travel solid power lines, leading to hefty generators ensuring uninterrupted power supply to the sometimes hundreds, possibly thousands of computers whirring away inside. Of course once you clear the rigorous security controls and get inside the large halls of equipment are expansive and spotlessly clean. You get the sense that each neat row of cables above your head and tucked away under the raised floors serve a very important purpose. Rows and rows of computers and servers are stacked into shelves secured by locked cages.
But don’t think you’re going to see a list of the big name companies whose computers and servers reside in one of Telstra International’s data centres. It’s an industry saying that data centres are like ‘Fight Club’ – the first rule of data centres is ‘don’t talk about data centres’. Multinational companies rarely publicly discuss how many servers they operate in data centres around the world. It’s no surprise that for reasons from security to competitive advantage, companies don’t want to disclose too much on where their valuable details, information and operations are kept.
When it comes to the digital world, it’s absolutely here to stay – embedding into our lives more and more each day. Telstra’s investment in data centre facilities in the UK means we’re poised to take advantage of this exciting time as the business world and individuals alike cement themselves online.
* Data Center Knowledge (datacenterknowledge.com) ‘Facebook now has 30,000 servers’, 13th October 2009:
When we say that Facebook alone utilises 30,000 servers, each most likely comprising of several rack style fat clients that interlock to complete the node, we must ask ourselves of the immense power consumptions required supplying these sites. As we are launching into an age where internet is not only a right, but a given asset to virtually every member of the public, how are we going to continually supply power to this social toy? When is society going to realise that energy is a limited resource? Now that Australia is debating the next step in supplying energy to the public, are we realistically going to be able to support the sheer expansion that the cyber world is experiencing?
Wow great post Jason, thanks for writing about this. I am fascinated by data centres which sounds ultra geeky but true.
I reckon there is so much potential for personal computing with the evolution of cloud computing. Software, security, storage all in the cloud – sounds like the future to me.
Cloud computing will never be a realistic replacment for the computer as the bandwidth and link speed required to constantly upload and download info to your device would be immense, and then multiplied by the six billion other people around the globe. It’s interesting that the concept of cloud computing is primarily driven by marketing rather than consumer.
Cloud computing is already here. Google Docs, Hotmail as two examples. Consumers will tire of the clunky PC devices we use now. Even if we end up keeping them, the desire for lifestyle devices like the netbook and iPad and even some of the smarter phone handsets out there will gradually undermine their importance. As regards shifting the data around, well networks are getting faster and at the same time the need for providers to optimise content for the current relatively slow mobile networks and devices makes for a happy convergence at some future point. I get your point about Cloud being a marketing rather than technical concept though. It is too generic and regularly used incorrectly as a vehicle for describing online services with no real underlying processing of a central data set.