Really Thinking Inside the Box

I've long been fascinated by how past generations tended to imagine the future, and how far short those visions fall.  I don't own a single metallic jumpsuit (at least not since the death of disco).  My Prius talks and starts at the push of a button; but I still have to drive, and it stubbornly refuses to fly.  In fact, nothing in my life hovers or defies gravity even a little.  None of the furnishings in my home are polycarbonate.  Neither the kitchen nor the bathroom are fundamentally different than they were a century ago.  My front door merely swings silently on hinges--sans Star Trek whoosh--and doesn't greet me as I approach. I can't vacation on the moon or the ocean floor, and I've never been served a cocktail by a robo-butler nor had sex with an android pleasure unit.  Frankly, I feel a tad let down.

Back in the early 1980s, whatever we imagined a computer would look like in 25 years hasn't come to pass.  Certainly, the voice and gestural interfaces don't exist, but even the boxes that house laptop and desktop systems haven't changed all that much.  Inside the boxes, computing power and storage went through the roof; but outside, it's still a clamshell laptop or an AT-style case.  Even data centers haven't seen dramatic change. Virtualization has effected invisible changes, but outwardly things in those chilly, windowless bunkers look pretty much the same as a decade ago.

So, it was refreshing to see something new in system packaging that is dramatically different, at least in terms of scale.  It turns out that tomorrow's data center won't look like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise or HAL 9000.  Instead, it will bear a uncanny resemblance to a truck stop or maybe your local container port--more Blade Runner than Minority Report.  Both Microsoft and Google are committing fabulous sums to building containerized data centers, where 40 foot shipping containers just like those that carried everything on the shelves of your local Wal-Mart from China house thousands of servers.  These become giant electronic Legos, plugged in and pulled out like blade servers, but with a crane or semi.

It makes sense.  Moving to cloud computing means that all the necessary horsepower and storage runs in a data center.  In such a massively parallel environment, petabytes are just thumbdrives and racks are 40-foot containers.  Google has already turned servers into light bulbs--hundreds of thousands of cheap, generic commodities that swap in and out quickly when they fail.  But modularizing a data center in this fashion promises to be enormously energy efficient and generate mind-blowing economies of scale.  Want to have the best LAN Party on the block?  Just have Data-Centers-to-Go drop off a container and a keg.  Need to scale up for a big EDD project?  Rent a secondhand data center and put it out in the parking lot for the weekend.

Okay, maybe you won't be the first one on your block to have one of these; but, the folks who handle your online searches and sell you SaaS are going to have plenty of 'em.  Want to see your computer in a few years?  Except for the elegant interface and screen, chances are the guts of it just drove by...behind that 18-wheeler.