INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
extraordinary growth rates as internet usage
booms with the proliferation of Internet-of-
Things technologies.
education specialists such as CNet Training,
I am approaching data centres as socially
expressive artefacts through which cultural
consciousness (and unconsciousness) is
articulated and communicated.
This also makes data centres ripe territory
for conspiracy theories and media interest,
which is another reason why they increasingly
render themselves hyper-visible through
highly publicised marketing campaigns. You
often get the feeling, however, that these
visual odes to transparency are in actual
fact deployed to obscure something else,
like the environmental implications of cloud
computing or the fact that your data is stored
on some company’s hard drives in a building
somewhere you’ll never be able to access.
The cloud unclothed
CNet Training recently provided me with
something of a backstage pass to the
cloud when they allowed me to audit their
CDCMP® data centre programme. ‘The
Cloud’, as it is commonly known, is a very
misleading metaphor. Its connotations of
ethereality and immateriality obscure the
physical reality of this infrastructure and
seemingly suggest that your data is some sort
of evaporation in a weird internet water cycle.
The little existing academic research on data
centres typically argues that the industry
strives for invisibility and uses the cloud
metaphor to further obscure the political
reality of data storage. My ethnographic
experience so far, however, seems to suggest
quite the opposite; that the industry is
somewhat stuck behind the marketable but
misleading cloud metaphor that really only
serves to confuse customers.
Consequently, it seems that a big part of
many data centres’ marketing strategies is
to raise awareness that the cloud is material
by rendering data centres more visible.
We are thus finding ourselves increasingly
inundated with high-res images of data
centres displaying how stable and secure
they are.
Data centres have in fact become something
like technophilic spectacles, with websites
and e-magazines constantly showcasing
flashy images of these technologically-
endowed spaces. The growing popularity
of data centre photography – a seemingly
emerging genre concerned with
photographing the furniture of data centres
in ways that make it look exhilarating – fuels
the fervour and demand for images of
techno-spatial excess.
Photos of science fictional datacentrescapes
now saturate the industry and the internet,
from Kubrickian stills of sterile, spaceship-like
interiors full of reflective aisles of alienware
server cabinets to titillating glamour shots
of pre-action mist systems and, of course,
www.intelligentcio.com
Alex Taylor, an anthropology PhD student
from the University of Cambridge
the occasional suggestive close-up of a
CRAC unit. One image in particular recurs in
data centre advertising campaigns and has
quickly become what people imagine when
they think of a data centre: the image of
an empty aisle flanked by futuristic-looking
server cabinets bathed in the blue light of
coruscating LEDs.
With increased visibility comes public
awareness of the physical machinery that
powers the cloud mirage. This new-found
physicality brings with it the associations
of decay, entropy and, most importantly,
vulnerability that are endemic to all things
physical. As counterintuitive as it may seem,
vulnerability is what data centres need so that
they may then sell themselves as the safest,
most secure and resilient choice for clients.
Some (loosely connected) social
effects of cloud culture
The combination of the confusing cloud
metaphor with the almost impenetrable,
acronym-heavy jargon and the generally
inward-looking orientation of the data centre
sector effectively blackboxes data centres and
cloud computing from industry outsiders.
This means that the industry has ended
up a very middle-aged-male-dominated
industry with a severe lack of young people,
despite the fact that it’s one of the fastest
growing, most high-tech industries in the
UK and expected to continue to sustain
Furthermore, while cloud computing makes
it incredibly easy for businesses to get online
and access IT resources that once only
larger companies could afford, the less-
talked-about inverse effect of this is that the
cloud also makes it incredibly difficult for
businesses to not use the cloud.
Consider, for a moment, the importance of
this. In a world of near-compulsory online
presence, the widespread availability and
accessibility of IT resources makes it more
work for businesses to get by without
using the cloud. The cloud not only has an
incredibly normative presence but comes
with a strange kind of (non-weather-
related) pressure, a kind of enforced
conformity to be online. It wouldn’t be
surprising if we begin to see resistance to
this, with businesses emerging whose USP
is simply that they are not cloud-based or
don’t have an online presence.
And the current mass exodus into the
cloud has seemingly induced a kind of
‘moral panic’ about our increasing societal
dependence upon digital technology and,
by extension, the resilience, sustainability
and security of digital society and the
underlying computer ‘grid’ that supports
it. Fear of a potential digital disaster in the
cloud-based future is not only reflected
by cultural artifacts such as TV shows
about global blackouts and books about
electromagnetic pulse (EMP), but is also
present in a number of practices within the
data centre industry, from routine Disaster
Recovery plans to the construction of EMP-
proof data centres underground for the
long-term bunkering of data. n
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