Platform Logic Meets Data Centers: The Strategic Value of Disposability

• In Event: Data Centers and Disposability

Abstract

After using the platform model to reorganize many sectors of economic and social life, companies such as Facebook, Google, or Microsoft, are now taking up properties of infrastructures to maintain their dominance. A sign of this “infrastructuralization” is their increasing presence in the data center industry. This interest goes beyond building capacity for their own computing needs, but now aims to “disrupt” this industry to become a dominant player. This “infrastructural turn” of GAFAM companies matters, as it constitutes an extension of their power over the global data infrastructure.

Facebook is a key example, as it is currently leveraging the platform logic to enter the data center industry. Based on results from ethnographic observations of the Facebook-created Open Compute Project annual meeting, I show how Facebook advocates for making all the components of a data center disposable (e.g. racks, switches, hard drives), in two ways: as a previously black-boxed technology that can be accessed, customized, and made modular; but also that can be easily discarded and replaced when deficient.

Making components of a data center disposable has two benefits for Facebook. It aims to simplify the maintenance of data centers: if a component is down, it can seamlessly be removed without tools, and another one plugged in, without impacting the whole rack. Second, this hyper-customisation of all components allows new actors, such as Facebook, to bypass traditional manufacturers, typically selling all-in-one black-boxed technologies, and eventually to promote its own model of data centers manufacturing.

Author

• Jean Christophe Plantin, London School of Economics and Political Science