XBlog

This Cloud Isn’t Made of Gas

Welcome to the XNet blog. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our  RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The recession hasn’t done much to slow down the flood of technology splashing down on us since Silicon Valley exploded in the 90’s. After the boom and bust of the dot.com era, ideas were launched worldwide that had been fomenting since the 1950’s in tiny alcoves of academia and industry.

40 some years of pressure build up can cause quite a bang.

Kicking Up the Dust

Today’s “cloud computing” buzz is like the dust kicked up by the tech bubble’s explosion, and despite claiming a “virtual” existence, the physical infrastructure for this “cloud” is an impressive bit of machinery.

Google alone operates out of 36 datacenters and with the global interest in electronic medical records, a national health information network, intelligence sharing centers for law enforcement and emergency management, traffic cameras and all the rest,  the number of data-centers being opened (and needing construction) around the globe is staggering.

Take a quick look at this worldwide map of data-center locations and see for yourself:

http://www.datacentermap.com/

They may call it a “cloud”, but with this kind of physical infrastructure the so-called  “cloud” isn’t very gaseous.