From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 37

abundant, reliable, and inexpensive supplies of water and power, and ben-
eits from proximity to Toronto, which provides it with excellent Internet
connections. Canadian cloud-data-center companies have also pioneered
the use of energy-saving systems. OVH.com, a Quebec-based company,
uses a unique heat-dissipation and cooling system that has completely
eliminated the need for air-conditioning servers in its Canadian locations,
and reduced it by 98 percent in its worldwide locations.
Canada, like the Scandinavian nations with which it vies for data-center
business, also beneits from political stability and strong data security.
Additionally, Canada beneits from proximity to the United States and
the additional incentive that data located in Canada is not subject to the
USA PATRIOT Act, which permits the U.S. government to intercept
and analyze data stored within its borders without a search warrant. In
addition to Canadian and Scandinavian locations, Switzerland, with its
long-standing political neutrality, is an increasingly favored choice for
data centers, but it is expensive. All the discussion of size and proximity
to resources makes clear that cloud computing is a very material industry
with locational requirements that belie the image of an ephemeral cloud.
Cloud-computing data centers are the communication version of those
industrial transportation hubs of the past where, for example, the city of
Chicago played a large role in America's industrial expansion. It should
not be surprising that, until recently, the largest cloud data center in the
world was located in that city. Of course, data centers are not rail yards,
but just as transportation centers were key nodes in the global industrial
grid, cloud data centers are material hubs for global information and
communication trafic. Images of invisible data moving through clouds
help convey a sense of what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000)
describes as our era's “liquid modernity.” Today's iconic products are data,
information, and messages, which low around the world through thin
wires or just through the air. But they are rooted in physical structures
that make signiicant material demands on resources and that call to mind
the factories of an earlier era. Understanding cloud computing absolutely
requires an appreciation of its materiality, of its substantial physicality and
its extraordinary demands on the environment.
There are many other ways to describe this dance of petabytes and
zettabytes, and we will certainly explore some of these, but sufice it to say
that nothing in the history of communication and information processing