Data Centers: Is Bigger Really Better?
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From the abstract: Very large data centers are very expensive (servers, power/cool-ing, networking, physical plant.) Newer, geo-diverse, distributed or containerized designs offer a more economical alternative. We argue that a significant portion of cloud services are embarrassingly distributed - meaning there are high performance realizations that do not require massive internal communication among large server pools. We argue further that these embarrassingly distributed applications are a good match for realization in small distributed data center designs.Yi-Jian Ngo unpacks the paper here, saying that the cloud-computing infrastructure players are "locked in an arms race to build the biggest, baddest data centers out there, preferably somewhere in the boondocks with cheap land and big waterfalls," but the approach "may be misguided." |
