Add a Comment Now - We Want to Hear From You
There's a story in the newly free-for-online-viewing Wall Street Journal about how companies expanding globally often use multiple headquarters, leaving their original headquarters locations behind in an effort to become "global brands." For example, Lenovo is a Chinese company - but they've got headquarters in Singapore and Raleigh.
Companies have varied reasons for moving beyond the nest. Some, like UniCredit or Lenovo, found their businesses and work forces reshaped after cross-border mergers or acquisitions. Others, like consultancy Accenture Ltd., which has no headquarters and whose CEO has no office, are reflecting their far-flung customers.
Obviously, distributed companies require distributed networks; Wide Area Networks obviously play a big part in getting each of the “world headquarters” of these companies the information that they need in a timely fashion, and it is only getting bigger.
But that got me to thinking - if you can have headquarters anywhere in the world - why couldn't you have a datacenter anywhere in the world, separate from the headquarters?
With the caveat that what I'm suggesting would be a huge expense with returns on investment that might not be apparent for decades…
I wonder about some of the logical conclusions to the trends we're seeing in IT. Specifically, we can now replace inefficient legacy servers with virtual machines on processors that require less energy than the previous generation - consolidating servers. At the same time, WAN optimization allows us to put all those servers in one place, instead of having multiple branch-office servers. These are the two most important current trends in networking right now, and they lead me to a simple thought:
If we need fewer computers, and distance is no longer as daunting as it was, why not vary the location of the servers so that there's an additional benefit.
By all means, you want to locate a company’s headquarters in the area where it makes the most economic sense to do so – but the data center is and always will be a cost of doing business and not a direct revenue generator itself, for most companies. As such, it almost doesn’t matter where the data center is, so long as the data still comes through reliably.
So it might make some sense to consider where the computers would cause the least amount of recurring cost. And one of the big recurring costs is power consumption - not just for the computers themselves, but for the air conditioning required to cool the computers.
Wouldn't it make sense, then, to put the data center in a colder climate, so less air conditioning is needed to cool it, fewer generators need to be purchased, and cooling consumes less energy?
Of course, there are tons of problems with this idea - the additional costs of heating the offices of the staff that must be located in the datacenter facilities - unless you have a plan for dealing with the static electricity discharges generated by parkas, and are willing to train the Siberian Husky teams the IT group will use to get from server to server not to mark their territory on anything mission critical.
In fact, it is very common for data centers to be remote from HQ. This is done to tap into affordable labor markets, provide a remote fail-over/disaster recovery location, reduce the risk of sabotage/terrorism, and avoid natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes in South FL, and yes, blizzards.
However, IMO the “green” issue is going to become big news in the US over the next couple of years, following Europe’s lead. C-level executives will want to tout their initiatives to reduce data center power consumption through new techniques.
Just a little thought exercise. So, readers, are you seeing anything like this happening in your own organizations?
