Using Dark Fiber to Displace Diesel Generators

Cloud providers and other data center operators are using geo-distributed data centers. But these data centers largely continue to employ the same designs as were appropriate for single data centers. These designs are wasteful because they do not take full advantage of geo-distribution. Geo-redundancy can reduce other redundancy at multiple intermediate layers in individual data centers and decrease costs. We discuss options for changing infrastructure design to realize such savings. Our proposal opens up an exciting and novel area of investigation into the design of software that can effectively leverage such platforms.