Re:Inside Facebook’s Oregon data center
by orangethirty on Saturday August 18, 2012 @11:21PM
(#4403103)
When the building, power, cooling, and compute is one integrated system its like a really really big PC cabinet.
Which makes it all more interesting. Seeing how they engineered to building to work somewhat like an old VW bug engine (the building uses water to cool, the engine uses oil) is very cool. Made think of how, in the not so far future, we might be building cities with data infrastructure as part of the regular utilities. And I don't mean cabling or optic fiber, but how we might use water from the sewers to cool down some underground datacenter. I might even see datacenters being spread alongside sewers. As the hardware becomes smaller, we might just create a data center in a tube and cool it with dirty water. Who knows?
Way ahead of you :-) I made up some plans for a 'pocket' data center (think pocket battleship). In the past such things have been infeasible because the scale was needed to achieve the economics, but advances in energy deployment and network design have created an opportunity here. Now we just need $25M to build one :-)
Re:Inside Facebook’s Oregon data center
by orangethirty on Sunday August 19, 2012 @07:35AM
(#4403786)
Given how Instagram is "valued" at one billion dollars (was it two?) I don't see how you would have much trouble raising twenty five million for something as game changing as that.
Your pocket data center sure opens up a lot of possibilities. A cell phone datacenter. Well, sort of like
a high powered botnet built around cell phones.
You get funding, I board a plane to wherever you build this, and help you hack it. :)
As I've told lots of folks, there isn't a lot of 'secret' non-obvious stuff for most folks when they decide to build an entire data center just for their gear. It completely removes the constrains that a generic co-location facility has to support 'any' gear, and that freedom allows you to do custom stuff which makes you more efficient. When the building, power, cooling, and compute is one integrated system its like a really really big PC cabinet :-)