socialmedian: The world of 'server huggers'

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The world of 'server huggers'

Source: Behind the Scenes

Nov 04, 2009

Summary

I took a recent trip "into the cloud" of the Internet for CNN.com. The goal was to find some or all of the photos, blog posts, status updates and documents I save to the Internet instead of on my laptop or work computer.

Part of the way through my adventure, after visiting an IBM cloud computing center (shown above), I learned the IT industry has a name for people like me who want to find the real locations of their digital data.

They call us "server huggers."

When Rich Miller, a blogger at Data Center Knowledge, told me about the term, which has a negative, Luddite connotation to it, I thought, "ACK! I don't want to be one of those."

But I do think there's value in knowing your cloud data has a real-world home in energy-sucking data centers all over the world, likely in secret locations.

I thought I'd share an ultimate example in server-huggery, which Miller pointed me to.

The Planet, a data storage company with centers in Dallas and Houston, Texas, and in London, England, recently held a promotion where they sent photos of their servers out to customers. And the

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