Data Movers: The Pipes Our Information Travels

Unseen, unnoticed concrete buildings, the kind you pass every day but never consider, these are the places where our data are moved. Make a call, send a text message, post an update on your Facebook page, your bits and bytes are moving through a glass tube about as thick as one of your hairs. 

Hub

Pumped underground or overhead, hanging from telephone poles, all of this information hovers in a critical balance. 

Traffic jams start at times when most people turn on their computers and connect to the world outside their own, slowing down the arrival of this information or dampening its quality. 

Aerial view of information traffic

All of this information relies on power. Not all power is alike. Noise, blips and blurps are all words that take on a whole new meaning when we work with electricity. Total Harmonic Distortion isn't the name of a thrashing speed metal band but is what happens when we don't have a quality source of energy. Because we’re bandwidth hogs, consuming data from numerous devices just about anywhere we want to, we’re also energy hogs.

DC Plant

The name of the game is five 9s reliability. 99.999%. But even still our information is vulnerable and its path can be easily interrupted by little things we never think of: a glass pipe bent at a funny angle, a bad drop from the utility lines to our house, a generator that doesn't turn on when it was supposed to because of a bad transfer switch, a brownout in the grid caused by a heat wave that triggered 100s of air conditioners to turn on at the same time. 

Our information is just going through pipes. And there are leaks and clogs just like with water. Everything flows when there is a clear path. But there's always impedance. 

DC Cabling

The next time your phone drops a call or your YouTube video takes a long time to buffer, think about the long path that information has to go. It's going through these buildings and huts in places you'd never think of. Climate controlled with blinking lights flashing on and off, humming with daily activity. The constant drone of a busy freeway outside your airport motel window. 

Rainbow Spaghetti

These are the Data Movers. And they're working 24 x 7 x 365, relying on thousands of pieces of computing and power equipment. In one of these huts, maybe 35 square feet in area, you can see the names of 30 big and small  manufacturers of conductors, resistors, capacitors, chips, copper, silicon, and plastic. In the large master information centers, you've got thousands of square feet of rainbow spaghetti wires, fiber coming in from underground and information blasted through satellite dishes.

Data Movers

And this is where our lives hang in a strange balance between what's real and what's virtual and where these realms overlap.