Nick Carr notes that a senior engineer at Sun Microsystems last week predicted that a large data centre is likely to suffer a disastrous failure some time next year, causing the biggest information technology panic since the invention of the personal computer virus in 1988.

I don’t know if that is indeed likely but there is no doubt we now rely to a worrying extent on data centres of the kind that support Google, universities, businesses and governments. Think of a data centre failure as in your computer’s hard drive crashing and taking with it all your photos, music and documents, except on a much bigger scale.

It is a truism that none of us really has adequate back-ups for all the irreplaceable material that we now keep on hard disks.

I have made an effort recently to back everything up in various formats - from DVDs to spare hard drives and even online. It takes a lot of time and concentration and, even then, you can never be sure whether back-ups are foolproof. I remember my shock at being told by an executive at a company that makes DVDs how prone old discs are to lose the data stored on them.

But we still live in the belief that the data held at professionally-run centres is immune from this kind of mishap. We should obviously think again.

Apart from anything else, the sheer amount of data now held in what is colloquially known as "the cloud" is intimidating. One measure of it is the electrical power needed to support such facilities. Carr suggests that some of the data centres now being built will each consume about the same amount of power as a small city.

Larry Page, one of Google’s co-founders, last month cited the company’s expertise in building energy-efficient data centres when launching its initiative to develop cheap electricity from renewable sources. Perhaps Google’s use of power to store data has given it a guilty conscience.

December 10th, 2007 in Technology | Permalink