The data centre of the future could be built from smartphones

There's an article just published in Wired magazine, titled: "The Data Centers of Tomorrow Will Use the Same Tech Our Phones Do." The data centre of the future, it says, "is about eliminating all vestiges of the proprietary hardware used in networking and storage in favour of commodity components available through the mobile supply chain. It’s about this commodity hardware performing the function of proprietary systems today."

According to Wired, the data centre of the future will be "a bunch of dirt cheap, cell-phone-like machines—all connected together with sophisticated software—instead of those power-sucking, refrigerator-sized boxes."

This indeed is the next logical step beyond the architecture espoused by Cloudera, which has its origins in Google: masses of commodity 'pizza boxes' comprising CPUs, memory and storage, where redundancy and data replication, managed by software, replace reliability, and which I wrote about last week. Cloudera CTO and founder Amr Awadallah claims that costs of storage in its technology can be as little as 100th those of conventional systems.

The vast majority of CPU chips in data centre servers are supplied by Intel, but as equipment densities in data centres increase, power and cooling become bigger issues. Much of the demand for capacity in data centres is coming from those mobile devices: many of the billions of apps on those billions of devices rely heavily on resources in the cloud.

Nowhere are power issues more critical than in smartphones: where the ever increasing demands of applications and higher speed communications are pushing the limits of battery and semiconductor technologies.

And who holds the lion's share of the smartphone processor market? Not Intel, but ARM. In 2013 it claimed to have a 90 percent share in smartphones; a 95 percent share in feature and voice phones; and, a 50 percent share in mobile computing devices including tablets, net books and laptops.

Some analysts think that Intel will start to make inroads into the mobile device market. Morningstar senior analyst Andy Ng wrote in June "While Intel has had limited success in penetrating the smartphone and tablet processor market so far, it has only begun to use its manufacturing technology advantage in its Atom product line. Intel's new Silvermont Atom chips are the first Atoms manufactured using cutting-edge process technology, as the firm used older-generation technologies for prior Atom products. As a result, we think Intel will have opportunities to achieve some success in mobile device processors as it fully harnesses its moat in that market."

Intel will be working very hard to achieve that success before its dominance of the data centre market is threatened by the evolution of the data centre into "a bunch of dirt cheap, cell-phone-like machines—all connected together with sophisticated software—instead of those power-sucking, refrigerator-sized boxes," or even instead of low cost Intel-powered pizza boxes.