Update on Cringely's Bad Math

Following up on my highly skeptical response to Cringely's "the sky is falling" web-hosting post, Brad Gibson, who designs data centers for a living, dropped me an email suggesting that I check out his blog. Here's a sample of his analysis:

Cringely overstates the actual (as opposed to the name-plate rated value) power consumption of the drive arrays by at least double. He also gets muddled up when he discusses data center floor space; mixing up total square footage with the square footage of the connected load space. He uses an incorrect approach to calculating "necessary" space to support "equipment" space. He makes some incorrect assumptions about the types of drives used in many of the arrays. The Cringely argument also completely overlooks load diversity in a data center.

Check out Brad's excellent piece here.

Brad's post also pointed me to the coverage of the Cringely piece on Memeorandum.