Monday, July 16, 2007

A datacenter in your home?



HP MediaSmart server powered by Windows Home Server | Crave : The gadget blog

By definition, way of wikipedia, a data center is "a facility used to house mission critical computer systems and associated components".

I bring this up because my client, DLR, is a major data center provider to the worlds largest corporations. They lease out data center space into the 100s of thousands of square feet to Fortune 2000 companies and the like.

So am I correct to read that computer manufacturers like HP, Dell and Cisco are attempting to take the data center into the home? Yes.

And it makes sense. In fact, I am anxious to build my own data center.

What does this mean?

Well, how many people do you know have their own domain? I own shawnfranklin.com and shawnnashley.com. I am even attempting to acquire shawn.com and ashley.com. Now imagine a data center in your home that houses your domain (e.g. shawnfranklin.com) where your website is designed to be your own "MySpace" like website that contains:
  • your blog
  • your slingbox connection
  • your own email address and one for every member of your family (if you do not already have one set up through a service like Gmail)
  • your photos (which you have housed on Google Picasa because you are a good data center manger of server spade)
  • your own T1 connection (because everyone in the family is streaming video all at once and you need the bandwidth)

Now doesn't that fiber to the home look even more attractive?:
  1. Telecommute - e.g. use an internet video phone to work from home in Dallas for a company in New York
  2. Your own web hosting - e.g. if your site goes down, its because of factors that you may have more control over
What implications does this have?:
  1. Power consumption - e.g. data centers are notorious for the amount of power they consume.
  2. Technical saavy - e.g. are you equipped with the knowledge you need to manage a web/email server?
  3. Cooling - e.g. these places need to be cool, much cooler than your normal 70 - 75 degrees in your house.
There is much more, but this is good food-for-thought for someone like me.


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