While most of my time these days is spent contemplating software and application considerations, I’d like to take a moment to address a topic which only occasionally gets the attention it deserves: the role of a high quality data center. While a few folks may think that networking and data center infrastructure are dead arts, I’m quite confident that there is still significant work going on in this space. Case in point: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Google, and (shockingly) Google are building massive new data centers taking advantage of all of the latest features to increase density and automation and reduce cost. At the end of the day, scale wins, and these facilities (which have price tags in the half-a-billion dollar range) have scale. Not to be outdone, incidentally, AOL has built a few big data centers — and sold them too. Continue reading →