RagingWire, a big name in data center solutions, has launched what will be the first of seven buildings in the data center mecca, Ashburn, Virginia.
Even by data center standards, their new building is what’s known among the community as huge, leaving a 245,000 square feet footprint on a 78-acre plot of land, according to Data Center Knowledge.
DataBank is also expanding in Dallas, Texas, adding to an already robust data center arsenal.
In fact, the whole industry is booming. Amazon raked in more money through AWS in 2017 than they did the two previous years combined. There is little wonder why, as 82% of companies report saving after transferring their web infrastructure to the cloud.
The question is, might there be a less expensive alternative? To answer this, we need to look at a tangentially related tech field.
The blockchain was invented 10 years ago by a still entirely anonymous person (or persons) by the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Of course, when people think about blockchain, they immediately jump to Bitcoin, and since that’s all about trustless payments and decentralized secure networks, you might be wondering what this has to do with data centers.
Well, blockchain technology these days is being utilized in ways Satoshi had never imagined. There are countless applications that run on a blockchain, including one that lets you collect and breed digital kittens.
The characteristics of the CPU are always changing and the importance of tech, digital storage, and integration are at an all-time high.
The blockchain that’s relevant here is is Sia. Sia is a decentralized cloud storage solution that, instead of putting faith in a server to hold data or run your application, breaks the data up into fragments, distributing it amongst the computers that make up the Sia network. Each individual that supports the network is incentivized with Sia coin rewards, and even if one of the computers on the network goes down, your data will remain completely secure. The cost of hosting your data on the Sia network is often significantly less than it would be from a traditional data center. This is largely because there’s no centralized corporate force with margins to worry about.
This solves the very real problem of data center vulnerabilities, yet it comes at an interesting price. The reason data centers are as huge and centralized as they are is due to the need for efficiency in both cooling energy and in electrical delivery. This keeps any data center running much more efficiently than most blockchains, certainly ones dedicated to data storage and hosting.
Therein lies the tradeoff; security or efficiency. For a number of large websites using AWS last year who suffered serious downtime due to a very simple employee error, the choice might be obvious.
Still, the data center industry is expanding, and while blockchain technology might be the future, the market is awfully quiet right now.