Steve Newcomb Blog

Well, as I promised earlier in my post a while ago, we promised to start sharing our models with folks and sharing our thinking in a way that hasn't been done before.

Today, we’re sharing a dashboard of our datacenter model with you.  While this particular model only represents a part of our entire model, our hope is that other companies will benefit from this analysis.

Also, we’re really interested in getting feedback on our model.  Maybe you’ll have some ideas that we didn’t consider.

Also, as promised, instead of just releasing just an Excel spreadsheet, we’ve created a nifty Flash dashboard with the Excel spreadsheet embedded i it that allows you simply to move sliders to see what happens to the graphs.  Keep in mind that we changed the baseline assumptions so that they do not reflect Powerset's exact numbers forecasts and we also simplified several sections to make it easier to understand.  As folks get used to the model, we will make it more complex later - (one of the things we will be doing is attaching the population model to it, so a company could forecast costs and revenues - then we will release the staffing model so you can include that as well.)  Our plan is at the end of the day, any company has a good starting point to begin modeling their company.

As I mentioned above, we didn’t cover all of the issues associated with building a datacenter, but we selected concepts that we thought would be widely applicable and thought-provoking.  The 5 issues we selected are:

• Index Size      - How many servers are required to crawl and store a known portion of the Web?

• Moore's Law   - instead of modeling Moore's law as a trend line, we broke it out into its 2 components Server Speed and Server Cost
  

• Lease vs. Buy - What drives a decision to lease servers versus paying cash?

• Lease vs. EC2 - What drives a decision to lease servers versus virtual computing (e.g. EC2)?

Click here to try it out for yourself!, feel free to comment, help out or simply beat me up.  If you would like to send comments or improvements, please feel free to send them to snewcomb@powerset.com, but please, please put DataCenter Model as the subject so I can apply a rule to sort them into the correct folder.  I promise that if you do I will respond as soon as I can.

That's all for now.  If you would like to see an advanced screen shot of the population model click go to the extended entry of this blog.