Whats more fun: Building out a data center or tearing one down?
Nelson: Decommissioning is hard. Consolidation is really tough. You’re trying to take stuff from a flying airplane and moving it to another flying airplane. You’re rebuilding an engine while it’s running. The shutdown of the data center on the EBay site was a really significant thing. They’d never shut one down. They’ve always built more. That was the trend, and now we’ve broke that. We just can’t sustain that. Building is always fun. You can do everything new, always the right way. And if you own the actual budget spreadsheet and architecture, you can do amazing things. When you don’t, that’s when the battles and challenges come in and it becomes really painful to build something out. You need to leverage and partner with people to spend money on things. I probably like building out better than tearing down. Some have suggested that large Internet companies can move from the physical redundancy of data centers and save power. Microsoft’s Christian Belady has said that some of the comp
