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  5. Building A Sustainable Cloud (And More Predictions): Page 3 of 3
Cloud Infrastructure

Building A Sustainable Cloud (And More Predictions): Page 3 of 3

I thought that the cloud was supposed to be about the aggregation of thousands of low-cost servers and disk drives, integrated together with a web services layer and a robust object store, all accessed as a pay-as-you-go service. Wasn't that how cloud service providers were supposed to make money--by using commodity components with their own "secret sauce" software on top? High-cost legacy infrastructure products are not congruent with building a long-term sustainable cloud.
Tom Trainer
May 13, 2011

Companies will stop building their own data centers. Companies simply can't afford to continue to build data centers at 50 megawatts of power per data center--up from 2 megawatts just 10 years ago. This means that in 10 years the amount of power to run a data center went up by 2,500%. At this rate, it will take 1,250 megawatts of power to run a data center 10 years from now, and most of that will be for storage. Companies building their own data centers are going to need their own co-generation power plants just to keep their data center going. Scratch that, they'll probably need windmills--and a lot of them.

All of these explosive power costs will inevitably lead to increased cloud deployments in the next three years. The benefits of cloud economics--like keeping multiple copies of your data in high-security data centers that someone else owns, maintains and pays for--will finally put an end to the pressures and financial difficulties of individual company data center build-out.

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