Watermills and Local Datacenters: Examples of Obsolescence

When I visit the typical customer datacenter I can’t help but think about the old watermills that powered ancient industry. 

Before there was electricity, man’s ingenuity was to harness the power of water to turn a ‘waterwheel’ to drive a mechanical process such as flour, lumber, or textile production.  Naturally, the mills had to be located locally to a water source to generate the power necessary to turn the waterwheel.  By the early 20th century, availability of cheap electrical energy made the watermill obsolete in developed countries.

In the dawn of the Information Age, our ‘waterwheel’ was (and often still is) our local datacenter.  Business is about information processing and that processing is composed of the datacenter services: servers, storage, and networking components.  Like watermills, we built our datacenters close to where we conduct our businesses - because we had too!   Not until our data networks grew from a trickle of data at speeds of 56Kbps and T1 speeds to tsunami like data volumes in the Gigabits, was it even possible to contemplate a remote central datacenter.

Today, much like an adolescent awkwardly developing new physical attributes, the Information Age is undergoing similar changes. Through the maturity of virtualization technology (compute, storage, and network) and high-speed network connectivity the business model of ‘the Cloud’ is possible.  The Cloud promises to be what electricity did to the watermill for local datacenters; make obsolete.  While the Cloud concept has been around for a number of years (hosted web sites for example) industry is just now recognizing that it is maturing enough to be considered for critical applications. 

We still have a long way to go before the Cloud is truly accepted as a utility.  There remain many geographic areas where broadband network is not available.  Businesses need to mature as Cloud providers and Cloud consumers.  Privacy and security concerns will challenge the final ingredient of the Cloud, which is trust.  All are challenges faced when electricity was similarly being adopted, and overcome. I predict by the mid 21^st century, the availability of cheap server computing, storage, and ubiquitous high-speed networking will make the local datacenter go the way of the watermill.  Obsolete.