design & facilities Management
A PHYSICAL CHALLENGE
Jonathan Arnold , managing director at Volta , explains why data centres are faster , smarter and more important than ever .
One of my favourite data centre related stories concerns a certain UK government minister who , it is reported , asked the question : ‘ With the cloud taking over , what will happen to all the empty data centres ?’ The suggestion behind the question seemed to be that the world ’ s information would , somehow , hover in data clouds somewhere in the earth ’ s atmosphere and that we ’ d be able to access whatever we wanted , whenever and wherever we happened to be at the time .
Substitute ‘ data centre ’ for ‘ data clouds ’ and that ’ s pretty much what the situation is becoming – all of our data is being housed in more and more data centres and , thanks to modern , robust , complex facilities and IT infrastructure , this data is available to us almost whenever and wherever we are . I say almost , because there are still some major connectivity challenges to be overcome – whether it ’ s the lack of a decent mobile signal in rather too many locations in the UK right now , or the somewhat bigger challenges facing the building out of physical infrastructure in the more remote parts of the planet ( a data centre on the moon any time soon ?).
28 | May 2017