Where the cloud meets the ground

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: has bothered to remove them. Often nobody knows which application is running on which server. A widely used method to find out is: “Let’s pull the plug and see who calls.”

Limited technology and misplaced incentives are to blame. Windows, the most pervasive operating system used in data centres, allows only one application to run on any one server because otherwise it might crash. So IT departments just kept adding machines when new applications were needed, leading to a condition known as ‘server sprawl’. This made sense at the time: servers were cheap, and ever-rising electricity bills were generally charged to a company’s facilities budget rather than to IT.

To understand the technology needed to industrialise data centres, it helps to look at the history of electricity. It was only after the widespread deployment of the ‘rotary converter’, a device that transforms one kind of current into another, that different power plants and generators could be assembled into a universal grid. Similarly, a technology called ‘virtualisation’ now allows physically separate computer systems to act as one.

The origins of virtualisation go back to the 1960s, when IBM developed the technology so that its customers could make better use of their mainframes. Yet it lingered in obscurity until VMware, now one of the world’s biggest software firms, applied it to the commodity computers in today’s data centres. It did that by developing a small program called hypervisor, a sort of electronic traffic cop that controls access to a computer’s processor and memory. It allows servers to be split into several ‘virtual machines’, each of which can run its own operating system and application.