Technology Marches On: Difference between revisions

** For instance, consider a megawatt commercial datacentre with a couple of thousand computers – and the smallest rack-mount servers are at least 19" x 1.75" by two or three feet deep. Each. Forty-two of these "one rack unit" computers would completely fill an equipment rack more than six feet tall. At that point, it's necessary to add more racks, row by row. Fifty of these 19" racks? That'd be an eighty foot long, six foot high, series of rows of racks of servers... and those computers will need many huge, powerful air conditioners to get rid of a megawatt of heat, and massive backup power if the mains fail, and carrier-sized quantities of backbone network fibre, with endless network hardware and enough security to rival Fort Knox. At this point, the "hallowed halls" are very large, very secure, very powerful because they're housing thousands of computers for hundreds of different clients. The backbone of the modern Internet is built to this scale - or larger.