Data Centers of the Future - A Look 25 Years Down the Road

With data, technology devices and Internet-of-Things exploding at record paces, what does the future of data centers look like 25 years from now? The current pace of investment in cloud data centers seems unsustainable. While the cost per byte is plummeting to near zero, the sheer numbers result in a bulky infrastructure that requires billions of dollars, and thousands of workers just to build a single cloud data center campus, with the major cloud providers constructing a dozen or more such campuses each around the globe just to keep pace.

Perhaps the answer lies in the trend toward smaller, low powered, high perfromance technology advances in high speed networking, data storage and retrieval, and processing horsepower. Rather than concentrating these functions in dozens of tech farms, the world of tomorrow may be sustained by the phenomenon of Ubiquity. In 2017, there are tens of thousands of telecom central offices and over 215,000 cell phone towers scattered throughout the country. Add to this the 4,425 satelittes Elon Musk wants to send into orbit and you have the makings of a blanket of ubiquitous “data centers”, albeit small, which can serve as a dynamic, integrated, autonomous web to store and retrieve data.

In 2009, one of Dell’s corporate data centers in Austin Texas consisted of over 6,000 sq ft of space with 150 racks containing the latest technology supporting a benchmarked IT workload and consuming 600kW of power. By 2014, just five years and two technology cycles later, the same workload was being performed in 2 racks taking up 100 sq ft and using about 40kW. Using this same rate of space and power efficiency improvement, the same workload in 25 years will be performed in a space the size of a Rubic’s cube and consuming 1/8th of a watt (sounds a lot like a CPU) and there is evidence that this pace can be achieved. This means there is the potential that the growth in the creation and transmission of data can grow by a factor of 15,625 times over the next 25 years without increasing our infrastructure footprint. Put another way, If the current rate of growth in data of 10 times every 7 years continues for the next 25 years, we will be able to reduce our infrastructure requirements by a third.

In 25 years, your personal communication device will still look like your smartphone today. It will connect to the world through technology similar to today’s cell networks but with much higher densities and throughput. Cell towers will communicate with the nearest central office which will now have cloud-like data center functionality to host, store and serve up data. Data algorithms will backup a large portion of the data upstream to the cloud data centers where they will functional largely as cold storage for the vast majority of stale data, while the live and active data will reside at the edge in the CO or in even livelier technology at the base of the cell tower. In addition, all COs will have high speed uplinks to satellites orbiting above the earth, which will function as data backups and relays for global data streams and perhaps as gateways for communities on other planets or space stations.

While the 50 or so large cloud campuses around the globe will continue to exist, the IoT model that will emerge will blend cell towers, satellites and COs into a ubiquitous web of store and forward Internet Depots that are hyper-integrated, self-healing, highly efficient and powered completely by renewable energy. The players at the table that will make this transition a reality include the owners of the cloud data center campuses, cell towers, and central offices, and the pipes and wireless spectrum connecting them together. In order to achieve the small footprints and power efficiencies, the hardware will be based on quantum computing or similar advanced computing technology, nanotechnology and AI algorithms to create, process and store information. Cell towers will be completely powered by a combination solar array and wind turbine module with advanced energy storage components. COs will be powered primarily with renewable energy and supplemented by small amounts of utility power.
This future reality seems way out there, but on the other hand the headlines of current technologies and trends are pointing so closely in that direction that it doesn’t seem so hard to imagine.