Look Forward by Looking Back

The idea that technology is relatively new, that it arose within the last fifty to one hundred years , is a common misconception . There have been great advances, particularly in the electronic age, but the truth of the matter is that technology has been around since human beings began bashing rock against rock.

One of the most interesting things about design is that it draws from many sources. Paintings by Raphael and Botticelli in the Renaissance were dependent on the mathematics of perspective geometry developed more than a millennia and a half before either were born. They also drew on the language and form of classical architecture and Greco-Roman mythology to provide settings for many of their works. Raphael and Botticelli created works that had never been seen before, but they could not have done this without the groundwork that had been set down in the previous centuries.

Look back to the most prolific designers and engineers in the history of western civilization: The Romans. Roman advances in design and technology are still with us today. If you cross a bridge to get to work, or take the subway , or walk down the street to get a latte, chances are you are doing so using elements of Roman design and technology. These elements are the arch and concrete.

When entering the Pantheon in Rome, most people probably don't remark, "What a great use of the arch!" and "That dome is a single concrete structure." However, without the modular design of the arch and the invention of concrete, the Roman Pantheon could not have been built.

The Romans understood that the arch, by design, had strength and the ability to transfer load from its center down to its base. They had used the arch in modular and linear ways to build bridges and carry water for their water systems. But in the Pantheon, the modularity of the arch realized its true potential. Spin an arch at its center point and you create a dome. This means that across any point in the span you have the strength of the arch. Also, they had found that concrete could be used to bond all of these arches together as a single dome. Concrete allowed this dome structure to scale beyond any other dome of its time. It would take eighteen centuries for technology to advance to the point where a larger dome than that of the Pantheon could be built.

What does the architecture of ancient Rome have to do with data centers? The physical architecture itself has little in common with data centers, but the design philosophy of this architecture does. In both cases, new ideas on how to construct things were needed. In both cases, using the existing design philosophies of the time, "post and lintel" for ancient Rome, and "watts per square foot " for data centers, would not scale to new requirements. It is this idea, the design philosophy of modular, scalable units, that is critical to meet the requirements of today's data centers and, more importantly, the data centers of the future.