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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (17881)	2/19/2007 4:18:44 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 46821

[UK - Power Crunch] Crisis looms as cost of internet servers rockets for banks By Rhys Blakely \| February 17, 2007 business.timesonline.co.uk The cost of leasing the servers that form the backbone of the internet has soared by 70 per cent in London in recent months, amid power shortages and predictions of a supply crunch. Analysts say that a surge in the use of trading applications by banks on private networks and increased traffic from online services such as video on the net will soon outstrip the capacity of Britain’s servers, which store and transmit data over the web. Keith Breed, of BroadGroup, the consultancy, said: “The UK’s data centres [which lease servers] will be full from the end of 2007.” That eventuality could prevent companies from backing up critical data and cause the internet to run much more slowly. Finding sites for new centres in London is difficult because the latest generation of “blade” servers use huge amounts of electricity, generate a lot of heat and require access to fibre-optic networks, which can cost £1,000 a foot to lay. A fully-laden blade server generates as much heat as two domestic ovens on full power. The electricity bill for the world’s servers is estimated at £4 billion last year, much of it spent on cooling. Mike Tobin, the chief executive of TeleCity Redbus, a data centre group supplier that has raised prices by up to 70 per cent, said: “London is clearly the firmest market in Europe and it is incredibly difficult to find new sites. The take-up of internet services has not been matched by investment in infrastructure.” The physical hub of the web in Britain is the London Internet Exchange in Docklands, through which 95 per cent of the UK’s internet traffic flows. It is located close to Canary Wharf’s banking powerhouses, which require the servers running trading applications to be as close as possible to those of the bourse that deals with the trades to beat rivals to deals. However, power supplies in East London are already at full capacity. When the dot-com boom ended in 2000, scores of data centres collapsed and their facilities were bought as distressed assets by operators who ran them at below-cost rates. It is estimated that €3 billion has been lost by the data centre industry in Europe over the past five years. Guy Willner, chief executive of IXEurope, a data centre group, said: “It’s been as if there was a carpark full of bankrupts’ Bentleys being sold for £5,000 each. Now that supply is nearly gone, customers are finding out the real list prices.” In the US, groups such as Google have built huge “server farms” near rivers to exploit hydro-electric resources. IXEurope has located its latest plant in Slough, where power is available. It said that moving any farther away from London would set response-time problems for traders. A server’s job - A user clicks on YouTube to watch a video clip - The request travels down a phone line, then a fibre-optic cable - It reaches a “meet-me room”, a server that moves it to a “client data room” - This room contains a server run by YouTube - probably in the UK If the data is “cached” on YouTube’s UK server, it will be fed back to the user - If not, it will search for the information on other servers - The process is overseen by the London Internet Exchange, which ensures network capacity, or “bandwidth”, is used as efficiently as possible -----