From Pet Systems to Cattle Farm — What Happened to the Data Center?
Feb 24, 2022
There's something about craftsmanship. It's personal, its artistry, and it can be incredibly effective in achieving its goals. On the other hand, mass-market production can be effective in other ways, through speed, efficiency, and cost savings. The story of data centers is one of going from craftsmanship – where every individual machine is a pet project, maintained with great care – to mass production with big server farms where individual units are completely disposable. In this article, we take a look at how data centers have changed shape over the decades. We examine the implications for data center workloads, and for the people that run them – who have now lost their pet systems. We'll also review the cybersecurity implications of the new data center landscape. Pet system with a big purpose For any sysadmin who started their career before the advent of virtualization and other cloud and automation technologies, systems were finely crafted pieces of hardware – and ...