Colocation America
Hollywood likes to exaggerate--often. They may not have the best grasp on how technology--data centers, specifically--works, but they still make great attempts at playing it up on the big screen. Data centers aren't the most exciting scenery available, but Hollywood has made great strides in displaying them to their advantage. Here are some of our favorite instances of data centers in Hollywood.
The Control Room was featured heavily in the James Bond movie GoldenEye, where James and Natalya Simonova attempt to thwart former MI-6 agent Alec Trevelyan and his plan for world domination...or whatever. While not really a "traditional" data center in the sense, you can tell that there are some servers definitely running in the place--where else is all that data going to come from? You may also remember this fondly from the fantastic multi-player level on GoldenEye 64 for the Nintendo 64.
HAL was a server that controlled the ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Eventually, he became sentient and turned evil, and that becomes a recurring theme in a lot of these. Looking at you, Skynet.
Probably the most "traditional" or realistic depiction of a data center comes from another James Bond epic, Skyfall. The main villain, Silva, runs this quaint little facility where to plans to dominate the world. First, he should look into fixing his cable management, then maybe take over the world. Baby steps.
Machines becoming sentient and taking over humanity, reducing Earth to a post-apocalyptic wasteland is often a theme with futuristic movies, and the forefather of all of this is the one and only Skynet. Skynet was sent to protect humanity and make our lives easier, but NOPE. It powers machines that it intends to murder us with. At least have a little sympathy for the people who wrote your source code, you know what I mean?
Someone thought it'd be a great idea to let that damn Dennis Nedry design the entire infrastructure of a theme park with a real life T-REX. Nobody second guessed this at all? At all? Nobody? Okay, whatever. Anyways, things go bad (nature finds a way...naturally), and they have to hack into the MAINFRAME to get the security systems back online. The good thing is that damn Dennis Nedry got what he deserved with some poison dinosaur spit in the face.
Yo a futuristic, kinda-realistic data center? Tron Legacy nailed that, man. No joke, I'd love to work in this data center. Seems cool and kinda nice for laser tag. Or that frisbee thing they play in Tron.
Again with the machines taking over. Normally, the machines power a data center that helps humans. In The Matrix, however, HUMANS power the data center that helps the machines. I mean, good on them, as we're a renewable source of energy and fairly green, so at least they're trying to stay environmentally friendly, even if they don't actually need an environment to survive.
In 1995, the movie Hackers was really off about what data centers actually looked like. This movie isn't even set in the future, but those blue laser columns on each side are actually the servers. Yep. Blue laser columns were all the rage in 1995.
In Ocean's Eleven, the criminals break into the casino's data center and begin rerouting wires to block a video feed. The actual depiction of the data center is pretty spot on, even if it's not as simple as removing one cable and plugging another in to totally block a video.
It's not just big time Hollywood movies that exaggerate data centers and their capabilities. Check out CSI for a really gratuitous case of hyperbole (like this sentence). To be able to run complex calculations, data searches and other stuff--simultaneously, as shown above--is incredibly difficult to do on a regular ol' PC. There has to be a massive data center powering the CSI team in their ever growing quest to find out which direction the bullet came from.
