Tom Vanderbilt on Digital Traffic

Tom Vanderbuilt, who wrote the entertaining "Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do", now has a piece on the virtual digital traffic. "Data Center Overload" profiles how companies are managing server farms that number up to 45000 machines in a single location. Data centers are the factories of the internet age, and for companies that rely on computation - their efficiency directly translates into the bottom line (Amazon estimates that each average 100ms delay per page load decreases their sales revenue by 1 percent).

The trend these days is to move more and more software infrastructure to the cloud, which means that data centers will migrate to locations that have the lowest energy and bandwidth costs. There it is - an opportunity for economically depressed towns with excess power generation capabilities ...