These past few weeks have been awkward ones for the company that hosts my blog, DreamHost. Lengthy outages have plagued its users, and just as one problem was solved, another one popped up.
You can read the whole sordid tale here, wherein DreamHost – to their credit – apologizes and – to their credit – explains what went wrong and what they’re doing to keep it from happening again. (Short version: “It burned down, fell over and then sank into the swamp.”) Some of their difficulty was technical: faulty hardware, misconfigured software, and a series of events so unfortunate that you’d swear the Baudelaire children were living in the server room.
But most of the problem can be traced to the electrical brownouts that hit California (and other parts of the U.S.) during the recent heat wave. When temperatures go up, air conditioners go on and the grid starts wheezing trying to keep up with the demand. And because data centres rely on large supplies of “clean” power, they’re especially vulnerable.
Power outages aren’t going away any time soon; if warming trends continue (as the scientific consensus predicts), they’re just going to get more frequent. And the Internet’s much-vaunted ability to route around barriers isn’t much use when you’re trying to access a mail, web, database or application server that just isn’t there.
Thousands (possibly millions) of people discovered that a few days ago, around the same time as the DreamHost outage. DreamHost’s data centre shares the building with a better-known tenant: MySpace, whose huge user community found themselves shut out of the site for 12 hours.
Consider that a very, very gentle hint at what is likely to come: longer and more intense heatwaves, wider and more protracted electrical outages, and unpredictable Internet blackouts hitting services more critical than this blog. And temperatures are only part of our changing weather forecast; stronger and more frequent hurricanes, for example, will wreak havoc on all kinds of infrastructure.
There are solutions, but they’re expensive ones: replicating servers in multiple cities, for example, and investing in a major increase in onsite power generation and storage capacity. Power utilities could rank data centres more highly in the pecking order when the time comes to ration electricity. As the situation gets worse, cities like Seattle and Vancouver – less vulnerable to heat-driven surges in electrical demand – will look increasingly attractive as companies seek cheaper, more reliable homes for their data warehouses.
That’s worth remembering the next time you hear the usual litany of hand-wringing over how much it would cost our economy to make the changes needed to conserve energy, move to clean alternatives and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (Make that how much it will cost; eventually, we’ll simply run out of options.) The damage from inaction is already happening, and it’s only going to grow.
Meanwhile, who’s up for a good solar-powered web host?
