Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:04 Michelle was that your, um, was that a fingerprint
Speaker 1 00:00:06 Scan? There was a hand scanner for entering the data center. You always need to match mentioned the hand scanner before you can open the doors depending on your privilege and
Speaker 0 00:00:16 All your customers are a hand
Speaker 1 00:00:19 Scan. Every customer has it. Uh, every customer also has an individual scenario, so they can only access what they are allowed to. This is a day whole, and when we get inside, it becomes a little bit noisy. So
Speaker 3 00:00:57 Hey, you're listening to failed architecture. My name's Charlie <inaudible>, I'm joined by my cohost mark Minkin hay and Renee bull. I, this is the first episode of Feld architecture. And today we're going to be talking about data centers. Mark has the reins for this episode, but first, perhaps Renee, you'd like to explain why we're talking in the first place. Why we're hosting unfocused.
Speaker 4 00:01:21 Sure. Charlie. Yeah, so, I mean, we've been editing and writing on a field architecture website for like five, six or seven years now. And we thought it was time to try new forms of architecture criticism. And we thought that a podcast would allow us to, you have to go more in depth and do more focused, reflections on all kinds of architecture. But at the same time, we also feel that there's a kind of a dominance of the visual in architecture, which you can see in like the slick, hyper realistic renderings or, or to ruin porn that we've discussed often filled architecture. And we feel that by delving into audio, we can maybe try to overcome this in some
Speaker 3 00:01:58 Kind of way kind of focus on human stories and social justice music.
Speaker 4 00:02:05 Exactly. That kind of thing.
Speaker 3 00:02:06 I'm kind of like referring to a few things that were touching upon in the first few episodes, but video games. Yeah. And just trying to re focused the interest on the fact that architecture is a, it's a narrative thing. It's something that you kind of, you, you form in your head and
Speaker 4 00:02:26 It will try to, I mean, it was a forced us to, to talk about it and to describe it and to, and to delve into this narrative more than, you know, just be impressed by the, by the visual visual power.
Speaker 3 00:02:37 Cause I, I mean, I think the thing that's quite often forgotten about with architecture is that it, it continues to exist after the architects walked away from the building. Right. And there's so many other people's stories that form that architecture afterwards, buildings don't cease to exist after they've been built of course in it. So if we take the narrative from just the architect and open it up much more than maybe more people can also have the feeling that they, they too have something to say about architecture. Another thing, great thing about having the podcast is that we get to enter a lot of different spaces, you know, in different people. You could excuse to talk to different people basically. And I think this is really, really a strong aspect of the first episode that we've got today. Um, maybe mark, you want to talk a little bit about it? Yeah. Because the podcast for this episode specifically allowed us to get inside a data center, a designer data center, basically. And it's a building that popped up in Amsterdam. I think about six months ago. It really drew our attention because it's a captivating building. It's, uh, it's a skyscraper for, for data basically it's windowless and it's taller than most buildings in the city. Yeah. I mean, like it's in the middle of kind of a large sort of empty space. So it does kind of cut quite an impressive figure and
Speaker 4 00:04:02 It's next to the ring road. So everybody drives by and see it when you, when you cycle by or you run by quite a distance already.
Speaker 3 00:04:09 Yeah. Which is kind of like, it goes against in a way what we think about when I think of the internet. Right. It's yeah. It's like, it's very definitively there, whereas I guess we've kind of come to think of the cloud as a cloud.
Speaker 4 00:04:24 Yeah. Something very light and transparent, but yeah. And here it is like as a, as a physical reality, like this hard drive, like in the middle of the city and basically
Speaker 3 00:04:33 Yeah. Yeah. Because it seems like all the information and entertainment just, uh, appears on your phone or on your smart device, nothing right. Out of thin air. Yeah. But it doesn't, there's this, this extremely heavy and intense infrastructure behind it, that's, that's actually keeping our digital society running. And I guess like suddenly it becomes not the realm of architects or technicians, but something that we have to delve into and work out, you know, what does this mean? It's a cultural artifact basically. So that's also how we approach it in this episode, because we will be talking to an anthropologist and a journalist who have been researching data centers and, and their impact on the world. Um, but also talk to the architects of this am four data towers in Amsterdam. Um, yeah, the firm that designed this building is, um, Bentham Crowel architects, which is a very famous firm here in the Netherlands. Um, people might know it from the central train stations of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, um, but also the stay look museum here in Amsterdam. And interestingly enough, they also did the redesign of Anne Frank's house fun fact. But what's interesting is that these data centers really being treated as design it's being discussed in architectural media, but also mainstream media. So,
Speaker 4 00:05:55 And it was nominated for an architecture prize. I
Speaker 3 00:05:58 Heard you, right. It really is a kind of new direction for this form of architecture previously. It was something that was to be hidden away, protected, secured, um, something that really did stimulate this idea of the cloud being invisible. Exactly. Maybe, maybe we can see this like design treatments of, of data centers as a, as a tipping point of, of data centers becoming more visible and more accepted in our, in our, in our landscape, in our cities as well. And that's also what we'll talk about in this episode, that data centers are actually urbanizing, um, not only providing connectivity, but also other things to cities, something else we'll talk about is the environmental impact, which is a big issue for the, for the industry's all conversations will go into that as well. Um, but maybe we should also just say a few words about what this building looks like.
Speaker 3 00:06:55 Right. Because it's, it's so, it's so impressive. It's so in your face, um, I mean, what was your first impression when you saw it? I mean, I didn't look at any pictures before, before seeing it, so it was actually quite a, I mean, genuinely a quite a sublime experience, you know, it's, it's something that gave me a quite considerable sense of, or, wow, this is, this is something that I haven't seen before. Um, and, you know, in keeping with the sublime experience was quite, quite a terrifying experience in a way, you know, I mean, wow, this is like a big piece of technological, um, architecture, you
Speaker 4 00:07:34 Know, it's also quite mediocre in the sense that it's just like a blown up hot, hot disc, isn't it? Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:07:40 Because that's like an obvious description or analogy that we could, we could pick, I guess, because it, it does look very much like this Laci external hard drive that was designed by Phillip stark on another 10 years ago or 15 years ago. Right. Um, and that's not something that the, um, that the architect would, would agree on, but it is, it kind of looks like that. Well, I, I kind of think, what would it look like if, you know, in, in four years time or 50 years time, you know, like, um, presume maybe it's just going to be knocked down, but like, it, it's a very, very solid structure, you know, and yeah, yeah. Actually it's, it's just as toll below ground as it is, uh, above ground that's to make it, to make it shockproof, basically, because of course you don't want your servers to be, um, wobbling and bad and the building, it actually costs 165 million to build, which I think it's quite a little bit for a building.
Speaker 3 00:08:32 Um, maybe I should say a little bit about the, the optical illusion that they had, that the facade gives off as the architect, explain it to me, the facade consists of all these fertile triangular stripes, which become more narrow towards the top. And that makes the tower look slimmer. And the building also seems to change color from black to silver, depending on the angle from, from which you look at it. And because the young colored aluminum reflects all the colors that the Arcon grasp, it reflects the sky pretty neatly. So if you want to be poetic and look for symbolism in the design, you can, you can say that it, the building reveals the cloud, but let's not go there. I mean, it is a very thoughtful structure, you know, I think you can see from the speaking to the architect that he was, he was very proud of it.
Speaker 3 00:09:24 I mean, uh, I, I can understand why we kind of walked around this quite, um, otherworldly space. It, it felt like something that you might see in sci-fi film in a, in a spaceship, I'm thinking in particular about the, um, the kind of contrast between blue lights and black boxes, you know, and, and the way it, it really did evoke the inside of the death star in star wars or all the films that kind of copied that style, you know, and I don't imagine that that was unintentional. I think it was what I'd imagined. A lot of developers going in there would think that, wow, this is cool, you know, and, and there was a clear
Speaker 0 00:10:06 Focus on appealing to the customer. Yeah, well maybe we should introduce the boss of the data center who was kind enough to invite us in and give us a tour and sit down to explain what's actually going on inside. There's this looming futuristic tower and how the data center business works. Yeah, let's, let's do this thing.
Speaker 5 00:10:34 My name is <inaudible>, I'm the managing director of equity, it's Ben and Luxe. And we are part of the largest data center company in the world. Uh, we have, I think at this moment around a hundred to 90 data centers around the globe, mainly at location where data centers are actually the center of communication. So not so much the larger footprints where there's only a sheer data or a, or compute power, but we are actually connecting everything together. We are the locations where our cables come together. Our customers come together and exchange information. Nevertheless, there's huge amounts of data here. I use amount of compute, but the special thing, huge amount of exchange here, information,
Speaker 3 00:11:16 It does sound a bit like the equivalent of the Rotterdam Harbor, for example, the port of place where things come in in this case, digital connection comes in and then it's transferred to the rest of the world again, is that how it,
Speaker 5 00:11:31 And see the, the, the manifestation of a physical ports where you shipping goods and ship out goods and exchange goods, and some goods are actually remanufactured or, you know, repackage. That is exactly what happens here. Uh, we actually take the information, you know, whether it's from the U S or from Asia, and it's being repackaged, shares are being repurposed there and it's being distributed.
Speaker 3 00:11:53 What is, what is the product or service that you sell? Well, there's
Speaker 5 00:11:58 The basic product of a data center is actually very simple. It is actually the square meters, which you can rent. So, and it's square meters that actually includes power and of course cooling and the possibility to connect with fiber to our customers. So you can see as a hotel for servers or computers. Yeah. And
Speaker 3 00:12:18 I think I've read that some well-known customers of yours are companies like Microsoft or Amazon.
Speaker 5 00:12:24 Yeah. All the older, larger cloud players are a customer. So Amazon, uh, cloud is here, uh, Microsoft cloud, Oracle clouds, Google clouds. And I can go on because they're
Speaker 3 00:12:35 All here. Why is this building like actually quite a couple of more of your data centers? I think there's a, um, seven and eight are already, uh, being built. Why are these located in Amsterdam?
Speaker 5 00:12:49 Yeah, so far for the us SSL Equinix, the most important thing is that our data centers being built up on the fiber infrastructure of the internet. So in Amsterdam, it's really grew here at science park in 1992, when the internet started, that's when really the infrastructure started here and it only grew. So connectivity is all about, uh, uh, performance and performance can be measured in latency. So you can imagine that, you know, if somebody's, uh, on their smartphone and it takes too long, they swipe away. So it's all about having the data on time at your smartphone, but there are applications that are actually more strict. For instance, in London, we have huge financial data centers where you have the, uh, uh, exchange, uh, engine and then banks and traders and information and everything around it in one data center. So everything outside the data center
Speaker 0 00:13:43 Is too far. So low latency is business, or even more simply time is money for exchange data centers. Like these it's important that they're close to end-users. So that things load just about instantly on our devices. That's why we're seeing a sort of urbanization of these data centers, because they have to be where people in businesses are in order to understand a little more about the worldwide spread of data centers. In general, I contacted Ingrid Burrington Hey, Ingrid is an artist and writer who works on explaining complex systems like the internet and how people live with them, her artwork, but also her journalism for media. Like the Atlantic are about getting people to think about the technologies that our society depends on. I asked
Speaker 3 00:14:28 Her why data centers are located, where they are in the world.
Speaker 6 00:14:33 So there, there's sort of a convergence of a few different things that makes a place, a good data center region, uh, resources are, are actually probably the biggest one, like land cheap power rates, uh, cheap water because, uh, cooling systems are really integral to keeping data centers running. And then another piece that is temperature like climate, and there's sort of a weird like meats, like component to it, the polices that have infrastructure and become the places that have more infrastructure. So places in the U S where or railroad lines run, become places where fiber routes run, become places where people put data centers, because the data centers want to be able to very quickly connect themselves to existing fiber routes, because they don't want to build new ones. Another factor beyond sort of literal sort of landscape and climate, um, is more of a political decisions about who's going to give you a good deal to build the data center.
Speaker 6 00:15:33 So, um, companies will get certain kinds of tax incentives to construct. I know, um, that Ireland said these really, really, uh, advantageous tax schemes up for tech companies to build there. And that's also like, it's, it's actually a pretty good place to put data centers because it's pretty like cool and like, kind of like foggy and stuff. Um, and it's close enough to all of these other major kind of communication hubs, places like the UK. And then there are different kinds of tasks that different places become suited towards. So Facebook has a data center in Lulea Sweden, which is like, kind of in the Arctic circle that data center is specifically used for what's called like literally called cold storage. So when you're, when you're scrolling through Facebook, going through photos and you go far enough back in time, like you don't really need that.
Speaker 6 00:16:25 You don't really need a photo from like 2011 or whatever to be immediately available. So to pull that particular image, that's rarely called upon because who's looking at photos from 2011, it's convenient to store them in a place that doesn't need to get used a lot. It's easier to have this stuff stored somewhere kind of far away. That's really easy to control the climate because it's already freezing cause you're Sweden. Um, a lot of the way that cloud computing actually works is that things will be distributed across many data centers at any given time. And that it's it's, it doesn't necessarily live in one place. So like when Amazon web services has a data center region, like what that means is they have many data centers across the sort of small territory and your data could be in any one of those at any given time.
Speaker 0 00:17:18 Let's introduce Alex Taylor. Who's a social anthropologist at the university of Cambridge. Alex's research is about the codes and customs of the data center industry. The data
Speaker 7 00:17:28 Is where I conducted field work. I would just basically describe them as hives of social activity. They were full of people coming and going on a daily basis and they were staffed 24, seven as well. So I was sort of treating, I guess, data center professionals, as you would treat what we used to call a tribe. I mean, they are, they've got their own language and everything like this. I mean, it was so, uh, I find it very difficult to actually sort begin to even understand what the cloud was or how data centers really worked, just because the sort of jargon was so acronym heavy that I had to just, I had to just get familiar with this vocabulary at first. So I started off by going on a, um, a, a training program, a week-long training sort of data center management program. So I actually got a qualification. I became a qualified data center management professional, a CDC MP, and other acronym. So, um, yeah, so that was a really useful starting point for me for getting sort of familiar with, I guess, the coordinates of the field site itself.
Speaker 3 00:18:20 So if I think, I think he could say that architecture is, um, is a physical manifestation of its time. So as totems of our time, what do data centers tell us about today's culture?
Speaker 7 00:18:34 This is a really good question. Um, as totems of art, I think these buildings, especially that sort of proliferation, this, this sort of ongoing expansive data centers, which were sort of all complicit in what these buildings say, something about the data saturation of digital culture, and consequently reflect our sort of own glutinous, or you can eat usage and consumption of data. It has this sort of massive environmental problem. And obviously the, um, this sort of green rhetoric that so many companies you're like probably everyone's bank these days encourages people to go green at auto, like, um, uh, to use online communication rather than snail mail or paper based communication because obviously papers like killing trees and all these things. But at the same time, the, uh, this sort of raises the, uh, the environmental devastation that the data center industry or the cloud itself is causing.
Speaker 7 00:19:26 And so you've got this idea that somehow using online internet services are actually sort of carbon free in a way when really they're not, in fact they could potentially be worse. I'm really looking at the very, very physical side of the, uh, of the cloud, which sort of is in direct contrast to this very, I know immaterial nonphysical, imaginary that the metaphor seems to sort of conjure it's so versatile. It can mean so many different things, and it's got so many sort of weird, um, sort of layers and overtones and connotations to it that you can play with and use for so many different ways. So it's, yeah, that's something I've enjoyed.
Speaker 3 00:20:01 Yeah. So my next, very simple, but enormous question is what is the cloud?
Speaker 7 00:20:08 Yeah, I've, I've been asked this a lot of times and it's a, it's a question I can never actually properly answer. Um, basically, uh, I mean, during my field work, I found that depending on who you ask, you'll get a very different definition of the cloud. It seems that nobody has, I mean, everyone's got their own definitions, but there is no collective agreement as to what the cloud is or anything like that. So, I mean, for me, the clouds, lots of things, it's a, a metaphor, an infrastructure, um, an imagination, a lifestyle, um, uh, technology it's,
Speaker 0 00:20:38 It's, it's sort of, um, a recipe that's composed of all these different parts of things. How do I see the cloud? Um, Ingrid Burrington says that we shouldn't be fooled by this image of a soft and feather like cloud.
Speaker 6 00:20:53 I think about the cloud. I think that it's a, um, a convenient metaphor for making, uh, the heavy and industrial seem light and ineffable and manageable. I mean, on a technical level, completely understand cloud computing as a thing in a concept. But I think that the premise of the cloud as something seemingly effortless is a bit of a risky position to take, because it means that one loses the loses sight of so much energy and labor, and just kind of like transformation to space that I think is, is a really interesting aspect of living in a networked world. There is a tendency for tech to be deemed sort of placeless in a way that I think is, is to our detriment of our understanding of what it is to live with it because, you know, humans live in the world. So, so seeing it as, as, as part of a landscape is I think a useful kind of lens through which
Speaker 0 00:21:53 Let's go back to that landscape then, and take a look at the hardware of this building. I asked the director of Equinix, what is needed from a
Speaker 3 00:22:00 Building to be a good data center as
Speaker 5 00:22:04 A data center company. We look at the technical because, you know, you need power, you need cooling, uh, you need people, uh, you need to be able to service it. It needs to be environmentally
Speaker 3 00:22:15 Friendly. Customers are using a
Speaker 5 00:22:17 Lot of, uh, electricity. So what we try to do is minimize our footprint and really make it so as friendly as possible because we invest in these data centers for 20 years or more. So we want to make sure that this state of the art, uh, dead is kind of what our expectations. So this is the first place. The second thing is, of course, when you want to build it, uh, areas like this, where there's a lot of infrastructure. And then, I mean, uh, fiber infrastructure where we like to sit, you have to adapt to the requirements of, uh, in this case of the university, we had to buy the terrain from them. And they said, well, it's very important that the, the university is an open area where people come and have education or resource, et cetera. So it should actually blend into the environment. Our normal data sends us offenses where it really blocks out people and is really shielded from the outside. And this should be much more of an open data center, which for us is very hard it's because data centers are, are closed.
Speaker 0 00:23:16 So what does this mean? Architecturally
Speaker 8 00:23:20 False. I'm an architect and partner at Benson crosswalk. Thanks.
Speaker 0 00:23:24 I asked the architect of the data tower, how we tried to make the building open
Speaker 3 00:23:28 And secure at the same time.
Speaker 8 00:23:30 Uh, when we came in the building, we were walking on a bridge over, going over a moat. And that's, it's actually the first, uh, security layer. We laid around the building with our several layers in this building. And the first one is the moat and the bridge, uh, right. And you're entered, uh, the huge entrance lobby Frodo in his building. Then, uh, essentially you are in this customer area and we connected this area with the two data center, buildings, fire, two bridges, and that's an extra security layer being, building
Speaker 0 00:24:02 The security bridge between the answer is building in the data towers and outspoken, right? The message is basically a floating tunnel with a bright red interior through its windows. You can see the slick tower rising in front of you. We were escorted towards it.
Speaker 3 00:24:16 And finally, into data space.
Speaker 0 00:24:26 Michelle was that your, um, was that a fingerprint
Speaker 1 00:24:29 Scan? There was a hand scanner for entering the data center. You always, you mentioned the hand scanner before you can open the doors depending on your privilege and
Speaker 0 00:24:38 All your customers are a hand
Speaker 1 00:24:41 Scan. Every customer has it. Uh, every customer also has individual as scenario, so they can only access what they are allowed to. This is a data hole. And when we get inside, it becomes a little bit noisy. So <inaudible>,
Speaker 2 00:25:06 Those are the coding machines
Speaker 1 00:25:09 And the coding machines are actually cooling all the air that's coming from all the server
Speaker 0 00:25:24 Of course, one of the reasons to do a broadcast about data centers was to have an excuse to get inside one. And here we are, the data tower consists of large open floors totalling 24,000 square meters of surface space, cold white space in jargon entering one of these futuristic spaces. You see white floors and ceilings with bright reds and yellow cable trays running overhead and big black boxes lining the pathways. These boxes are the cooling machines behind which the server rooms are situated. <inaudible> Listening to this. You can almost feel the amount of energy powering this building, right. Gumby is surprised, and that energy uses one of the major issues for the data center industry. Also for Equinix, we wanted to also
Speaker 5 00:26:20 To make a flagship data center, and it should be more innovative than a normal data center. One of the interesting things is that we started to exchange heat, uh, through our underground Wells with the university. So they could use the warms that is produced by the data center, and they could heat their own buildings in winter. The building can be much more than only just providing internet to the community. It can also provide warmth in winter
Speaker 0 00:26:47 Sounds like a win-win doesn't it. If data centers are indeed urbanizing, they could potentially play a central role in a city circular energy system. So is this access hate already being used on a serious scale? Well, in
Speaker 5 00:27:01 The Netherlands it's of course interesting that we have a gas infrastructure. So every household and every building is its own gas. And probably you're aware that the government has said, you know, we should really get rid of the gas because the gas is finished and we cannot use it anymore. And then really the most reliable sources of heat are really next door they're today to Santos. So the, the data center industry asset, uh, all the heat that is being generated by the data center is actually for free. So, uh, you can pick it up. And, uh, the, uh, Amsterdam municipality is actually very interested in putting, uh, uh, heat nets in place where you can transport heat from data centers, but not too long addition. So it should be close, uh, really reuse that in households, you can imagine that data centers like these can, uh, fuel then thousands of households for heat in winter.
Speaker 3 00:27:54 But on the other hand, I also heard that the power use of this building is, is similar to that of an average Dutch city.
Speaker 5 00:28:02 It does. It does. It is yes, the, the power consumption, the sheer power consumption of, of, of buildings. Like these is enormous and, uh, it's necessary because in ever product we consume in our, all the things we do, there's always a, a digital bit. So even Dell products nowadays, you know, you pay digital. So to Batemans is digital, or, you know, even tiny things are becoming digital nowadays. And we all want that. We all want that convenience. And we all optimize for instance, our general, when we use applications like Uber. And, but the downside is you have to process it somewhere and that's being done in our data center and that's pure energy electricity. We use it. Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:28:44 He's got a point there at least in simple economic terms of supply and demand, the constant connectivity that we want comes at a cost. You and I want to stream high quality video and music on our phones at any time and receive notifications around the clock or listen to podcasts for that matter. The reason your smartphone is so small and you don't have to charge it every 15 minutes is because most of the storage and processing is outsourced to cloud infrastructure, which costs a lot of energy to run Ashton and British charity that promote sustainable energy, calculated that the energy of cost to watch an HD video from YouTube on your phone for only 45 seconds could keep an led light bulb lit for an hour. In light of this, I asked Michelle where his data centers energy comes from. Well, the
Speaker 5 00:29:31 Power w we, we buy power in Nance, we buy green power, uh, with our supplier. Um, but that's also one of the challenges I think, for the Dutch that has a bigger demand than green power. So that is challenging, but that's not up to us. It's up to our suppliers.
Speaker 0 00:29:48 Yeah. I've also heard people suggest that, you know, because data centers consume so much energy that these data center providers that they should also invest in building.
Speaker 5 00:30:02 We do, we do in a, in a, in, uh, uh, in the U S we, uh, invested, uh, very large amounts, sums amounts for 10 years, uh, in wind farm. So we buy from wind farms in the U S uh, we, we tried to do the same in the Netherlands, but it's not available. You cannot buy it, that stuff. Uh, but as soon as they are availability of have enough way into Netherlands, we'll, uh, we'll do that as well.
Speaker 0 00:30:29 So, okay. Hayden that's for excess Borum in green energy supplier, really for others to take care of. I was curious to hear where Ingrid Barrington things have the sustainability stories told by data center companies,
Speaker 6 00:30:41 Data center, people love to tell you about how efficient their data centers are like their ability to get their energy costs like super my newly precisely down and use use things as efficiently as possible is, is like this really, really big deal. Um, partly because, you know, energy's literally money, but also like there's a good sort of green PR aspect to it. A lot of the, the big platform companies, their approach to kind of addressing their, their carbon footprint or their electricity usage has been to, to enter into these things called power purchase agreements, which are basically, uh, contracts made with local utility companies to pay for the construction of renewable energy resources that are roughly going to equate to the amount of power that the data center is likely to use in a year. And in exchange for covering those costs, the company gets a fixed rate for how much money they pay for their power usage annually for like a five-year period or something like that.
Speaker 6 00:31:45 And so it's really economically beneficial to the company is because it's a lot easier to kind of make long-term forecasting plans. When you have a low fixed rate for your power costs, it's kind of good for the utility companies because they get the addition of this new piece to the grid and it, you know, expands their green energy portfolio, whether or not it actually means that their carbon footprint is so-called canceled out. I've always like a little bit skeptical of, because it's not as though, like they just plug in the Google data center to a wind turbine and that's that, and you can draw a direct line. Electricity is always kind of coming from many different sources. It's probably a little bit of the wind and a little bit of coal-based or a little bit of hydro. And it all kind of like when it gets into the mix, it's not as easy to delineate, but it's sort of the best compromise for trying to, to create some sort of offset for, for the data centers, energy use, any impact or old data
Speaker 0 00:32:41 Centers, companies so concerned about sustainability.
Speaker 6 00:32:45 Hm. Oh, absolutely not. Um, like you got to kind of already be pretty powerful and have a lot of money to be basically buying wind farms for your data centers. And you have to have like, kind of a public interest kind of concern. So like a lot of that investment really started with Greenpeace calling out big platforms in 2012 for building their data centers in places that had primarily kind of cold based grids and giving them a lot, a lot of flack for not really thinking about the way that their location is. I would kind of lead to the burning of more fossil fuels. And so for smaller companies who don't necessarily have like one don't have enough money to justify doing that into like, don't have a high enough profile for it to matter. They're just kind of doing their thing. And some companies, I mean, there are smaller companies that have been able to kind of put pressure on municipalities.
Speaker 6 00:33:39 Um, there's in the United States, one example is a switch, which is like a co-location services data center company got the state of Nevada to do a lot of investment into more renewable energy sources that led to other companies building data centers in the state. So like apple has a big data center. They're building in Nevada for the most part though, like any of the investment in sort of renewable energy stuff within the data center industry is mostly being driven by the big platforms who have kind of their own motives for doing it. And like maybe it benefits more people in the end. I've had, I had a friend who was arguing with me that I shouldn't be so cynical about these investments because in some ways, you know, Google and Amazon are basically giving, giving the green power at a headstart, but I, yeah, they're not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.
Speaker 0 00:34:34 You've also visited many data centers. I mean, you got inside, uh, quite a few, I think, what are they generally like?
Speaker 6 00:34:43 So I've gotten into data centers primarily through the cover of journalism in general, getting inside data centers means you're getting inside a data center on a company's terms. You're seeing what they want you to see. And they're telling you a story that they want you to tell about them. So a lot of it has honestly felt a bit like smoke and mirrors in some ways. It's, it's interesting to look at sort of technically like here's what we're doing with our racks. Here's how we manage our cooling systems. But there is something also just sort of about the kind of image that a company likes to project about itself via its data centers. Visiting a Facebook data center in Iowa was probably the most surreal of any of the data centers I've ever visited because they have no good reason to let people in. They don't, they don't rent, they don't need to, they don't need to drum up good press to get other people to use data centers.
Speaker 6 00:35:38 They're just kind of using them as sort of these kind of bizarre PR objects. And it seemed like they really wanted the story. They really wanted me to tell was how open they were and how much, how much they shared and how much sharing they facilitated. So, and also how, how significant this, this infrastructural work was relative to this like long timeline of history. Like they took us down this corridor that had this sort of like timeline of different moments in the histories of human communications. And it starts with like this hand print on a cave wall and like, you know, drawings, the like Lesko paintings or whatever. And, you know, it goes and like the invention of like paper and the printing press and the radio, and it keeps going in. The last thing in the timeline is literally a Facebook, like, like there's a weird way in which the way that they were telling the history of communications to like edit all comes down to finally reaching the perfect form of human communication.
Speaker 6 00:36:36 In some ways I think this is part of the, like showing off of their data centers is it's like, not only do we have this, you know, kind of fuzzy social infrastructure mandate, we also have all these beautiful buildings and they're really nicely designed and they have murals and video games room, and they're really efficient. And everyone who works here is really nice. I think that the shift toward more visible network infrastructure has been one that's been kind of happening. And in some ways it's, it's, I think it's kind of a strategic recognition that trying to hide these things just kind of is, is nonsensical. And to that, that there is maybe a recognition of the ways in which these, these like a willingness to kind of leverage them and sort of like, I kinda wanna say marketing assets, um, like there's sort of the fetishizing of the data center first is this sort of like unknowable, like box that that is like hidden, um, is this sort of mystery to be solved. That was a narrative that companies couldn't really control. And so when they kind of step in and they're like, no, no, no, we're going to let you look at our data centers and we're going to make them really beautiful. And we're going to get, you know, famous architects to work on them. Like there's also like the lure of the data center to, uh, to like famous architects, I imagine is partly driven by that sense of like, ah, the whole, the architecture, but for machines, not for humans, like it's quite, it's quite poetic. No,
Speaker 0 00:38:03 It's very poetic. And it also reminded us of Karl Lagerfeld, 2016 fashion show for Chanel, for which the catwalk was turned into a white space with models, walking through server wrecks, fully equipped with Gables and flickering lights. I do production for today. I don't do collection for yesterday and the eighties or the seventies. I remember thinking very much that was girl with some sound from his fashion show. I also asked Alex the social anthropologist, the image of data centers in popular media
Speaker 7 00:38:39 That, um, these images of facilities that you see released by data centers tend to offer very little meaningful insights into the realities of data storage practices. You get these sort of, um, I guess you'd call them sort of glossy closeups of wires and pipes and servers, but the sort of bits of infrastructure are completely sort of decontextualized. And also another thing that's, um, frequently missing is the people. Um, I think one of the interesting things about the Chanel show is how some of the models were also dressed up as robots. And, um, I think this plays into this bigger cultural fantasy of these buildings as robotic automated spaces. The guys that I was working with, the CEO of one of the data centers I worked with was actually he hired a photographer on a deck once to come and photograph the facility because he just because the images needed to be updated, he felt for the brochures and stuff like that.
Speaker 7 00:39:30 And, um, he said that basically I was allowed to sort of shadow this photographer as we walked around and we had to sort of interrupt maintenance workers or plumbers in the cottage. I was trying to fix the sort of pipes and getting them to step out of the shop because we needed these, these photos of the data center. And the photographer said that people were in the shots because you've got this idea of sort of science-fiction or space or a very sort of, um, futuristic space and having some bloke there with his beer belly, fixing a sort of server doesn't really fit in with that image of a cutting edge futuristic space. I was told that the less human you can make these spaces appear the sort of more secure they look because the number one cause of downtime is always human error. They say, if you've got this image of a cloud, it sort of seems sort of, I don't know, unbreakable in a way clouds are just sort of these formless things that drift across the world. And there's no, um, yeah, there's no sort of real fragility or breakability there, but suddenly if you start thinking of these things as physical, they suddenly stop the possibility of fragility arises.
Speaker 0 00:40:29 I also wanted to hear from Equinix, how they protect the fragile elements of
Speaker 5 00:40:32 The cloud, the world
Speaker 0 00:40:35 Today demands constant connectivity and data storage. So I can imagine that you do everything you can to minimize the possibility of, of downtime of data, loss of system failure. Could you explain, uh, how you do that?
Speaker 5 00:40:53 Of course, uh, the two most important thing is, is, is, uh, electricity and cooling. Uh, and we provide full backup of, uh, of every system, uh, via, uh, by ourself. So we procure, uh, electricity from the public grid, but we have a full backup here. So if the grid fails and actually did fail a couple of years ago, we can fully generate enough power to run efficiently, uh, by ourselves and the same as for cooling. Uh, although we don't the Beckley infinity, as long as there is enough, uh, these all we can get on time here, but we have contracts where we can supply around, uh, have our own supply of these on cooling. It's different because there's no grit we can get cooling from. So we have backup systems for everything we call it, the Mplus one concept. So if we have one thing, we always have a next thing. That's how we build everything, everything in this buildings for them. And the third thing is fiber without fiber doesn't really make sense to have an exchange like this. So if you look at this building, therefore data entries for fiber. So if one fiber line is caught there always, if we're not a fiber line and most customers are actually using the data, tend to hear and are backing it up without a data centers.
Speaker 0 00:42:09 So is that, I think that's the, um, a term that I recently read about an it term called fail over. Is that what
Speaker 5 00:42:17 It is? Yes. Feel over it's the ability that if one system fails, you can actually keep the surface running within our system. And nowadays, uh, if you look at clouds, clouds are very good and fail over. So you used to be able to, you know, switch on system down to switch one system up, but that took hours. Uh, if you have a cloud architecture, you can do that on the fly. So you can really seamlessly migrate the surface over a cloud, physical cloud in two buildings, from one cloud to another building. And, uh, this, uh, that's very sophisticated. So,
Speaker 0 00:42:55 So if the shit really hits the fan and this, this building goes up in flames, then you can switch over to a, like a backup. Yes,
Speaker 5 00:43:03 We have eight data centers in Amsterdam. So there are enough, there are seven auto backups where customers are, uh, it does work. Uh, I don't want to test it though. So it means
Speaker 0 00:43:14 That there was a complete backup of what's next. Yeah.
Speaker 5 00:43:16 Yeah. That's good. Yeah. There's a full, a redundant system in other buildings. Yes. Basically ever everything, uh, after a few hours, everything should be back to normal.
Speaker 0 00:43:26 And how often does this happen?
Speaker 5 00:43:28 It never happens. No, it never happens. We have, of course, single customers that go down sometimes, and that I have software problems. Most customers by now are putting more money in, in, in to providing that seamless service. Take a, a simple thing is nowadays lighting. There's, you know, even you have smart lightning, if you're a service, if your internet service on lightning fails, you know, your light is on all the time. You can switch it off. So you really want, uh, services to be a president always and, uh, everywhere. Yeah. But then
Speaker 0 00:44:02 Still there's a lot of just-in-case space.
Speaker 5 00:44:05 We invest a lot of money in that in case of things go bad that, you know, we, we always practice every month. We track practice every month we train, it never happens, but still we do death because if it happens, you need to be ready. So, yeah, there's a lot of, I would say almost wasted money in, in, in, in that exercise. But I think it is the guaranteed, like an insurance. You, you need to have that there in case something bad happens, you to be up and running
Speaker 0 00:44:33 Online, I've seen examples of floating and underwater and underground data centers, which are currently being built or prototype through. Do you expect to build anything like that in the near future?
Speaker 5 00:44:46 No, it's, it's, it's interesting. What, what is happening and then everybody's experimenting. I think putting things in on the water or, or another things is for us at this moment, not very realistic. For instance, I know that people are putting it in mountains in Norway, which is great because you have green energy and you can have a free cooling, uh, of the mountain, but you have, we need to connect it to the here in Amsterdam. So for us, it doesn't make sense, but you can think about data, send the expressions that are different than ours, but I would consider those more of niche players, which, which have those kinds of applications and those kinds of experiments. Then
Speaker 0 00:45:29 What do you see as the most spectacular scenario that could actually take place in, in the next 10 years or so?
Speaker 5 00:45:38 Well, I don't think we have to wait 10 years. I think, I think the most spectacular thing is actually right now we are as a world. And, you know, if you really take it from, you know, 10 miles high, we are actually building compute platforms, which are everywhere. And for everybody and always on the platform is already there is already being built. I think this compute form is actually also the, the sole reason why, uh, autonomous cars will happen. Why, uh, healthcare will happen by security will happen, you know, uh, we all want those kinds of things. And there are those platforms that are being built right now, nowadays are, are actually the base for all those future developments. Then I think that the typology, which we have now around the world, um, why are you F main hubs? Like Amsterdam was one of the, I would say the 10 largest hubs in the world day are becoming bigger.
Speaker 5 00:46:29 So th th the bigger hubs are becoming bigger and more important. Uh, you have the compute centers, which are at this moment outside of the cities. Uh, they might become part of the cities because that energy can be reuse in cities later on. So that is one thing. Interesting enough, if you look at many of our large customers like Google and Microsoft have used data center campuses outside of the cities, in rural areas, the question there is where can you really recycle for instance, the energy? So maybe it's a wrong choice. I don't know. I mean, it's a cheap choice for sure. The only thing that sometimes puzzles me is the size of the data centers. You know, if, if we as humanity, uh, keep consuming everything and doing everything this sheer size of the data centers can be, you can easily imagine that it has to be five or tenfold of what we have right now. And the question is, do we have place for that? And how do we do that? So, sheer size is I would say the biggest special,
Speaker 0 00:47:31 But at the same time also technological advancements probably make it easier to store more data in a lesson.
Speaker 5 00:47:39 Yes, we're very happy that, that the, you know, the storage is advancing, compute, compute is advancing. But the interesting thing is that this was research. And I think by IBM that every new year we produce, as, you know, as a world, the same amount of data is all the years before. And as because, you know, we go to a higher resolution video, we use artificial intelligence. So the amount of data that we are consuming, uh, is, is, is, is, is so big that more efficient storage is only helping a little bit. And that's why we keep building. And we are already busy with the new, um, the new projects, which are much larger than this project for, for, for the coming decade. So that is, that is the biggest concern. Can we keep up with the demand and how will that develop? You know, if you build a building, we societies of two times I am for, how does it look like that is just, yeah, that's fine. I imagine, yeah,
Speaker 7 00:48:38 I do agree with that from everyone I've spoken to as well at the moment, at least we are producing data faster than we can store data. So there's this, this is why all these sort of developments to try and come up with some sort of, it's like these ideas of an eternal data storage, medium that are small and durable. I let the holy grail, and they're all in the developmental stages at the moment. So there's no, there's no way these are going to become, um, sort of industry sort of industry deployed anytime sort of within the next, I dunno, 20 years properly. So at least for the, yeah, for that amount of lease for the next 20 years or something, I can't imagine there's going to be a huge shift, but after
Speaker 0 00:49:13 That, do you think that data centers, as we know them now, will they become obsolete at some point?
Speaker 7 00:49:19 I definitely think so. I think we're already kind of seeing this with processes like virtualization and also with the development of modular data centers, like the deployment of data centers in containers that can easily be moved and sort of deployed in sort of big scale or small scale operations. So I think the data center as a sort of, I guess you would call it big warehouse or industrial scales, sort of architecture will pretty much become a thing of the past in the not too distant future. Also with the development of new data storage technologies, like, I mean, there's so many sort of experiments going on at the moment. I actually did a lot of work with some guys in the university of south Hampton. Who've developed a terminal at an eternal supposedly data storage solution on glass warts. So you can store huge amounts of data in, on like a sort of thumbnail sized sort of glass stone, but also IBM are doing things with like DNA storage or a liquid data storage.
Speaker 7 00:50:12 So there's all these new data storage developments that are taking place, which again will potentially threatened the data center as a hard drive storing facility. But, um, I guess one big difference between the old telecommunications architectures and purpose-built data centers, which are known as Greenfield data centers, I would say is that these, these buildings, these new data centers don't seem built to last in the same way that the sort of concrete mega lists of the late, late 19th century and early 20th century did rather than become abandoned buildings to be retrofitted as data centers, um, for the next sort of telco revolution. I think data centers will be dismantled rather than become derelict. It's almost as if the industry itself is aware or its sort of impending obsolescence,
Speaker 0 00:50:57 The rise and fall of the data center. What does the architect think about this? So what if, because of rapid technological advancements data centers become obsolete in 10 or 20 years time from now, will this building become some sort of modern ruins?
Speaker 8 00:51:18 Uh, no, absolutely not. Um, we will need these buildings for years. Um, this building, it has some flexibility in it itself. Um, there's a lot of, uh, heavy structure in this building to be able to carry the loads. Uh, it has quite a large free height, so you can easily take off the facade, uh, at extra floors in it and then change it into a laboratory or even housing. So this will never be a ruin. And that's also think one of the tasks, uh, for an architect that this is a dedicated building designed to be a data center, but in the future, I think this building can have a second life with another function in it
Speaker 0 00:52:12 Personally are injured, tired of, uh, of the digital yet, or being on screens all the time and being connected all the time.
Speaker 5 00:52:20 Um, you mean as an end user, of course, it's interesting how this person as a person. Yeah. As a person, I must say, uh, I'm using it less than I used to do, but, um, I still see that we are using more and more intelligence. I'm using more and more intelligence. So I let myself be advised nowadays more by the terrific advise when I wake up. So I use it less. So I'm, I'm, I'm not so much of a user that tries to look at Facebook every five minutes because I don't, I'm not so interested in that, but the artificial intelligence part that is really convenient for me and that's what I like. So it doesn't necessarily improve the quality of life. I think it's how you use it yourself. And if you make the right choices, it can, but you can also make the wrong choices and then it's not very helpful.
Speaker 0 00:53:09 So what would you, what would you advise children on how to use their screens?
Speaker 5 00:53:14 Well, I have children, so as a parent, it's always hard, but I think first of all, you have to learn children to cope with it themselves because they will be in a world where everything is available. Always. I think you can forbid children to use their mobile phones or their PlayStations or whatever. But I think, uh, what we like to teach them is that the internet doesn't always work. I'm, I'm honest that they can use it themselves when they want to, that they're free of, you know, that they're not addicted to that screen or to those things. And that's sometimes hard nowadays. So it's really a mentality change that has to happen. And well, I'm trying to do that with my own family. Like a lot of other people, because our children will be living in an environment where everything is available all the time and I hope they make the right choice. Yes.
Speaker 0 00:54:11 So this was our first exploration into data space. And of course there's much more to discover, but what are your main takeaways for now? Charlie Renee?
Speaker 4 00:54:22 Yeah, for me, what was really amazing is to experience the internet. Like for me, and to now it has been quite an abstract notion and yeah, suddenly you can feel it and hear it and see it. I mean, you walk around among these surfers and then you, I mean, you see the surface of Uber or Instagram, all the services that you and other people might use on a daily basis. And suddenly it's not that cloud anymore. It has this, this physical existence and it also has this incredible energy.
Speaker 3 00:54:54 That's the thing I keep thinking about when talking about data centers is just how little anybody really speaks about the physical environmental. And I mean, technological changes that are being brought about very rapidly by these, these data centers. Uh, sometimes it gets talked about too much. It doesn't get talked about enough really. Um, the looming environmental catastrophe, and this is, this is a major source of energy consumption, uh, going forward. It's only expanding and people don't really don't really realize it. You know, it it's, it feels like a very, uh, clean transaction between you and your phone. And I mean, I think this podcast goes some of the way. And I think, you know, it's to your credit mark, that this is, this has been discussed with, with a really nice balance between people who are involved and people who are critical of, of, of, you know, if we look
Speaker 0 00:55:54 Forward, if we try to extrapolate this thing into the future, I mean, our, our data consumption is only expected to increase exponentially. So how are we going to deal with this? Um, how are we going to really manage the, to minimize the environmental toll of these
Speaker 4 00:56:12 Buildings? Now, one interesting way is that where we moved into our field architecture website to green host, which is a hosting provider, that's in the Netherlands that fully runs on renewable energy, but it's also working on all kinds of privacy issues. And it's the only host there in the Netherlands that doesn't lock email conversations, right? Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:56:34 Yeah, exactly. And they're also actively promoting freedom of press. So, um, I think I would also really like to promote green host. I mean, they're not, they're not paying us to say this
Speaker 3 00:56:46 Genuinely like a really important thing to going forward. It's, it's something that really needs to be, um, brought to people's attention. You know, it's such an important issue and that it's really great that they're there, they're around and that we've, we've gone for them, I think is, um, it's a start.
Speaker 0 00:57:04 And then the data center industries is also evolving is also innovating, of course. So I'm really curious to see what will happen if data centers will become an integral part of our cities or if they will just cease to exist. As we know them right now in the near future.
Speaker 3 00:57:20 I think that's for another fed architecture episode. If we have time, we've got a lot of other things to cover. Yeah. Maybe
Speaker 0 00:57:28 We should tell our listeners that if, if they like us, they can also support us. Right?
Speaker 3 00:57:34 Yeah. Support for failed architecture comes from our subscribers. If you liked this episode, then go to our website, find the support link. It's easy as in yellow. And if you like this, give us a bit of money. We can continue. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:57:51 Finally, I'd like to say thanks to a few people, of course, to Ingrid Alex Mitchell and Yost for, for being our guests on this show and for, um, inviting us into data space. Also thank you to Natalia Domingez for making the original music and thank you to heist. And for letting me record in their studio and bedroom, respectively, and a final things goes to the creative industries fund the Netherlands for helping us set up this podcast.
