15
Servers
Estrid Sørensen
This ‘speculative fabulation’1 unfolds in an imagined near future, and it is thus in itself a prediction. The characters also make predictions about server futures. All characters are fictive, but the scenes and conversations are inspired by my ethnographic research on data centres in Germany.2 The endnotes explain some of the conceptual and ethnographic foundations for the speculative fabulation.
‘Reporting is always a hassle, but after algorithms were introduced to collect, aggregate and transfer data centre data directly to the Ministry, I basically don’t care about it anymore,’ Signe tells me, with a slight smile.
She operates a university data centre, and today she appears particularly confident while showing me the all-white data centre operation room, brightly lit by the LEDs in the ceiling. This slim and inconspicuous woman is queen of the software monitoring the impressive IT machinery. We are looking at numbers and graphs of one of the many German data centres, whose storage, servers, networks, cooling and UPS3 together eat up more than 30%4 of the country’s total power consumption. The still-young Ministry for Planetary Survival hopes to decrease power demands through stricter supervision.
At its introduction back in 2024, the German Data Centre Register collected twelve climate variables.5 Today, it gathers fifty-two.
I talk to Signe because I am worried about the future of the planet and how data centres are involved in shaping it. How can you feel and understand the interdependence between data centres and the planet? Signe answers by pointing at six large monitors in front of us, full of numbers and colourful patterns. They make me feel illiterate, my eyes jumping restlessly from monitor to monitor hoping to find information I can relate to. Signe notices. She points with the cursor: ‘that is data on temperature of power supplies and CPUs, over there the temperature of the fans. That is data on humidity, on server virtualisation, and the SQLs,’ she explains. ‘It is a bit hard to relate to,’ I mumble.
The data centre is 2.5 kilometres away, but Signe reigns at a distance.
I notice an alarm popping up on one of the monitors. ‘Is there a problem you need to go and fix?’ I ask.
‘Oh, no, I can change parameters from here,’ she assures me and continues: ‘there are hardly ever physical problems. We replace servers before they require extra maintenance, power and care. These four racks,’ she continues, pointing with the cursor at four green squares on the top left monitor, ‘they were built in yesterday.’
‘And the old ones?’ I want to know.
‘Probably down at the janitor’s. He helped take them down.’
Distant judging observers6 cut relations to planet through data visualisation witnessing, I speak into my note system on the way to the janitor.
‘Here they are,’ the janitor declares, opening the door to a room crammed with university furniture and other ephemera, including, right at the entrance, server rack parts. ‘But not for long,’ he reveals, hands on hips in his green overalls. ‘They’ll be picked up in an hour. Between you and me,’ he reacts in a lower voice to my questioning gaze while bending towards me, ‘I advertise all this university waste through the classifieds. Nobody cares.’
Merchant gives planetary-industrial excess a second life, I type.
I return an hour later and see the janitor helping a middle-aged man transporting four server rack doors to his van. His name is Hans, a network mechanic.
‘Today, I’m the vulture of the data centre industry,’ he tells me moments later, when we are both seated in the blue van on the way to his home. We carry the racks into the basement of a beautiful Wilhelminian period villa in a small town in the countryside. Six racks full of humming servers already stand there, in the centre of a low-ceilinged room. This is one of the many private edge data centres that have been booming over the past decade in parallel to large hyperscalers.7
‘I covered all the walls and the ceiling with this polystyrene pyramid foam that absorbs the highest and most disturbing frequencies. It allows me to sit here comfortably,’ he says, gesturing to the armchair in the corner. The room’s warm yellow light contrasts with the cool blue fluorescent lamp atmosphere I am used to in data centres. It comes from a wooden floor lamp next to the desk, with a twentieth-century textile lampshade with flower embroidery.
‘Everything in here is recycled—and every single screw drawn in by myself,’ he proudly announces.
‘But can you rely on the old servers?’
‘I have a good feeling for the servers. I listen to them, I monitor their temperature.’ Hans reaches out and holds his hand at the back of a server to feel the hot air it blows into the room, while nodding quietly. ‘And I ask our co-laborators8 how the servers are working for them. They are local associations, the town’s cultural administration and the public library. We host servers and run shared applications for them. I meet with them twice a year and discuss the software packages, and how to adapt them to their needs.9 And don’t worry,’ he adds confidently, ‘they’ll tell me if performance goes down or if there are other irregularities. Then I know which server is struggling, and how to allocate the tasks differently across the servers. Or I replace a component, but rarely the whole server.’
On my way out, he reassures me: ‘Prolonging server life is prolonging planetary life.’
Servers’, users’, and carer’s oddkin10 intercourse is pregnant with planetary relations, I record.
Back at the university a few days later, I visit Matthias from the university’s proteomic research team. As I stand in their server room next to him, he asks me softly, ‘Can you hear it? Someone is making a complicated calculation.’
The humming, the LED lights flashing, the warm air. I thought I had come to know the feel of a data centre. Yet, my amateur ears still need guidance to differentiate the high tones of one server from the overall humming. But yes, there they are.
‘I can hear it,’ I exclaim with excitement.
‘At times, too many projects run calculations simultaneously. Then our professor queues them up and distributes computing time among them, so they don’t run at the same time. She knows the projects and she knows who needs what kind of computing,’ Matthias adds.
The withness11 thinks scientific work with server work… with12 planetary work, I enter into my note system.
Later that week, in the chemistry department, Felix suddenly gets up in the middle of our conversation and opens a wooden cupboard behind him. We have been talking about his data practices, and now I hear him push pieces of hardware around on the shelves. The inorganic chemist pulls out two hard disks.
‘They’ve been lying here safely for a decade,’ he says, ‘which is no problem. But when you plug them in and let electricity run through them, the motor will start up and everything starts to move. One day it goes “schrrfffss” and the hard drive is down the drain.’13
He also talks about his nine-year-old server in the basement of the building. And about the IT-administration’s process of centralising IT at the university. I think of Signe and her complete overview.
‘They want me to move it. But think about it: It sits there for nine long years, it has grown together with the rack, with the room and its specific humidity, with the stream of electrons, the cooling air that passes through it. They all live together at this very particular place on earth that is that server room. How will it survive being torn out of its habitat?’
Interdependent inorganic living matter situates the server in prolonged time, I add to my notes.
At home that evening, the fan of my laptop starts swirling hot air out of the chassis’ top left corner while I write up my fieldnotes. The computer will soon be 10 years old. I opened it recently and dusted it off inside. It still overheats when charging. I pull the power supply. I’ve noticed that it helps. I thought this was a plain workaround, but now I realise that I have learnt to listen to and feel my computer; to care for hardware.14 I first tried with monitoring software. But not until I listened to the fan and felt the heat did I start reacting appropriately.
I call Signe the following morning and ask her if she thinks she could prolong the life of the servers in the data centre, if she listened carefully to the servers and used her hands to feel their temperature? She laughs out loud.
‘You’ve talked to the server whisperers,’ she exclaims. ‘They are polluting your vision.’15
Blinded, I feel the planetary relations when servers are hot and when they are cold, when they blow and when they are loud. Then energy is at work, and metal wears off. Then users engage, and carers awake.