Jim, All,
I'm enjoying this discussion, and would like to add another perspective, if I may.
Our economy is no longer based, or as dependent on, manufacturing and so on as it is on information. Sometimes, very often, information on information. I think most would agree that this is more than simply a tad of an understatement.
We have the need today to either transport people or bits for the purposes of making powerpoint presentations. To a great extent, those Power Point presentations are, themselves, about nothing more than more spin and marketing for still additional forms of information systems.
This is a huge factor driving much of today's total business travel, no argument. "They" could just as easily have done the PPT demo via IP and a video- or audio-conferencing hookup, also over IP. Minus the human factor, of course, and the collateral activities associated with schmoozing and rubbing up one another, but that in and of itself is not my main point here.
My main point is that just like borrowing begets borrowing (borrowing from one of AHhaha's latest arguments today), information begets information, no matter how it is delivered, and it takes power to house, process, manage and store information in an amazingly upward-spiraling way.
In fact, as more information is conceived and processed, there is an increasing need to both manage and store not only the information, but the management systems that are used to manage and store the information, themselves. And the multimedia mode of delivery has not really found its wings yet. Where web-based processes are involved in these regards, content distribution networking schemes are employed, complete with their own set of caching and management requirements, to boot.
Storage begets more management systems, and management systems must be housed and managed, too. So, we have this self-propelling phenomenon, the upward-spiraling effect I alluded to a moment ago, of IT begetting more IT all the time. And mucht of it, by law, is non-perishable for some retention period. [Has anyone here tried to get a web page that has been cached removed from the 'Net recently? Save yourself a lot of time: Don't bother.]
The EXDS farms get larger, the storage silos begin to burst at the seems, and all the time more information is being processed, and some of that information is purely overhead needed to manage the information that came before it.
At some point the number of air routes can grow no further, and the number of available seats per flight reach their limits, too. The tell tale sign of this will be when the FAA, despite all best efforts, can no longer manage the situation and faced with an increasing number of accidents either curtails future route growth, or forces routes to be cut back. We're headed in that direction now, IMO.
But the server and storage farms continue to grow. Tangentially, the IT capacity curve will take off on its own path where the airflight capacity maxes out and begins to level off.
All of this will settle itself out as a matter of course, but it's difficult to envision how, just yet. In any event, the amount of power needed to support IT in the future, from a growth-rate perspective, will make the traffic energy consumption growth curves pale, in comparison.
So, keep those PowerPoint shows flowing. It will make little difference to the power consumption curve over time, whether they are delivered via jumbo jets or via IP. The amount of energy nourishment that those files require, for processing, storage, and management will just keep going up, just the same.
FAC |
