elearnspace

Ever stop to think about what happens behind a search request? Or the infrastructure required to upload an image to Flickr? I personally don’t spend too much time thinking about the complex system that supports the most basic online activities: searching, buying a book, finding a friend on Facebook or Twitter. Yet – as this article argues – Data Center Overload – data centres are the industrial facilities of our era. As individuals become more distributed (think “clouds”) in data storage and social interactions, data centres become more important: “Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network. The stack of letters becomes the e-mail database on the computer, which gives way to Hotmail or Gmail. The clipping sent to a friend becomes the attached PDF file, which becomes a set of shared bookmarks, hosted offsite.”