The current growth of internet needs4000+ new large scale data centers of computer systems. The global data growthwill reach more than 40 Zetabytes by 2020 which represents an average yearlygrowth of 42% starting at 4.5 Zetabytes in 2013. To host all this data, over4000 new big data centers have to to be built. And to achieve this goal, $ 1trillion USD investment capital is needed and land totalling the size of the UKwould be needed.
The Internet is one of the fastestgrowing industries in the world. In this article we'll explain why that's notalways such a good thing and where we see opportunities.
Internet capacity needs to become localized
A big majority of users in the worldconnect to servers that are not present in their region and as such experiencehigher costs and low performance. According to a study by datacentermap.com,80% of the data centers of the current Internet's service providers are basedin the U.S. and Europe. The rest of the world has scarce Internet resourcesdotted around territories.
As a consequence most Internet usersuse Internet-based services running on infrastructure which is located far awayfrom their physical location and most likely outside their country's borders.This decreases the general end-user experience (latency) but also addsunnecessary costs to transporting the information back and forth. Also, it addslegislation and compliance headaches to enterprises.
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The Internet needs to perform better
Compute and Storage vendors createpoor-performing solutions. There have been yearly improvements in hardwarefollowing Moore's law. While this has allowed ThreeFold to progress and innovate,it has also led to software developers taking these advances for granted;cutting corners where they can, creating sub-optimal code and allowing softwarecomponents to be layered on top of each other to achieve certain behavioralfunctionalities.
The inefficiencies have now led to asituation where organically-grown IT architectures are immensely complex. Theyuse a variety of components from different software and hardware vendorsintegrated by so called 'integrators'. The overall effort and cost involved tocreate, operate and maintain such architectures is growing continuously andrequiring an ever-increasing budget and resourcing to continue.
If we could go down to the corealgorithms and take another look at these, and innovate at the heart oftechnology instead of applying patches and pain killers, we would be able tocreate much more end-user capacity than what systems provide today. Systemswill last longer and will not have to be replaced by faster ones. Also, fewerengineers will be needed to create, operate and maintain these systems.Combined, these elements would present a more stable and reliable platform thatcan achieve higher levels of uptime.
Only upsides, right? Well a hugedownside of such an approach is that vendors will make less revenue and moreimportantly less margin as systems will run for longer, be more stable andrequire less updates. So why would vendors innovate at the core of theirsolution?
The Internet needs to become more sustainable
Did you know that the current Internetis responsible for between 5 and 10% of global energy consumptions? Making itmore harmful to our planet than the airline Industry. The good news is that wecan achieve 10x more power efficiency by addressing certain areas such asstorage.
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ThreeFold believes IT can do a muchbetter job at being more sustainable - in fact ThreeFold believes it can reducethe Internet’s carbon footprint by 10 times compared to other industrystandards in IT capacity producing solutions.
Power consumption is a function ofbetter compute and storage performance that in theory would require more racksand cooling. ThreeFold's architectural approach brought solutions that enablesit's Farmers to achieve roughly 3 times the performance per rack (so it usesfewer racks) and the racks require less energy than typical racks in theindustry.
The Internet needs to become more affordable
The biggest cost in running ITarchitectures is the human cost. Today's complex systems, built out of ‘bandaid and patches’ point solutions, organically-grown and badly documented ITinfrastructures, need an armada of people to keep them ticking. Even thoughthis is an example, one can learn a lot from the trends that are presented:
· On average an IT budget takes 5% of overallrevenues
· IT consumes 6.5% of the total number ofFull-time equivalent in the company, of which 85% are insourced and 15% onpayroll. This means that the enterprise doesn't retain internal know-how tooperate their IT.
· About 50% of IT budgets are spent onInfrastructure ane operations. Similarly, a big part goes to applications. Amere 5% is considered to be internal overhead within the IT department.
· Around 65% of the IT budget is spent onresources and services, around 35% is spent on hardware and software.
These figures present industry averagenumbers and paint a troubling picture that IT is a sizeable part of an overallbudget, and that most spending is going to have the right knowledge skillsinsourced to the organisation to run the core IT architecture it relies on. Forany other discipline in any organisation this would present an unacceptablerisk to the business and its continuity - strangely not for IT.
The Internet needs to become self-healing
The biggest source of downtime incomputer systems is people. Getting people involved in fixing infrastructureproblems creates the risk of accidentally causing more system downtime. A veryrecent example on this hit a large organisation cloud service provider.
20+ years ago when Internet datacenters came into existence next to telecom points of presence (POP), the levelof complication in architecting, and building and maintaining theseinfrastructures exploded. From an already reasonable complicated technologysetup to transport packets of data around the globe, these informationwarehouses were created where data was uploaded to, processed, and the obtainedresults sent back to end users on the other side of the globe.
Managing a data center that containssolutions for information transportation, storage and processing is not an easytask and the growth of data volume uploaded, stored and processed hasexponentially increased. The number of technologies invented and implemented inregards to the processing and storing of information has also exploded. Thisresulted in a double exponential growth in complexity to architect, build,operate and maintain these IT systems.
The time has come that we no longerrely on people to do the right thing in case of emergency - the complexity isoverwhelming and the dependency on the availability of that information ishuge. Having people to do manual deployments and operational responsibilities doesnot provide the agility and speed to keep up with the continuous exponentialgrowth of the industry. It is time to take the human element out of IT and letsmart and autonomous systems to take over. This will also let people focus onmore creative activities.
The world needs a responsible internet
On a humanitarian level theopportunities for creativity, learning and development are currently negativelyinfluenced by a lack of access to performant and affordable Internet services.Since Internet access is a human right, it should protect the status quobetween the developed and less-developed regions of our world.
The Internet is growing fast, with the wrongsolutions
It is evident that the currentsolutions are super unsustainable and make no sense. Luckily, ThreeFold andmany other start-ups are deploying new solutions.
