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Building a Data Center In 60 Days
miller60 writes "The facilities team at Australia's Pipe Networks is down to the wire in its bid to complete a data center in 60 days. And in an era when many major data-center projects are shrouded in secrecy, these guys are putting the entire effort online, with daily updates and photos on the company blog, a live webcam inside the facility, a countdown timer, and a punch-list of key tasks left to finish. Their goal is to complete the job by Friday morning eastern US time."
Why not forget the deadline and get it right? TFA says this was an exec's idea....go figure
i support the right to offend.
It's already Slashdotted.
Oh, it's just the server going up in smoke trying to serve a live webcam on Slashdot...
.: Max Romantschuk
They could also just have bought a couple of Sun Black Box datacenters in a truck container.
1. Get first DS3 up - check
2. Setup webcam - check
3. Setup webserver - check
4. Post on slashdot and soak the DS3 - check
5. Stress test in progress
I'm sorry, but 4,800 square feet and room/capacity for 170 server racks is a SERVER ROOM not a DATACENTER. I'm not trying to troll here, but this mis-use of the word datacenter gets old. The time/effort/planning/money it takes to build a datacenter is exponentially more complicated than to upfit an area to accommodate a few server racks.
In short, sticking in a few Liebert CRACs and a little 150kva UPS does not constitute "building a datacenter".
Everyone is doing that, why shouldn't they. Then we can fire managers that we hated the most.
-- tinyhack.com
This does not look good!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Project Black Box. Just drop it off in the parking lot and plug it in.
http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/index.jsp
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Uh, the article says that they aim to be complete at 9 am EST. While that might mean an American time zone in America, in Australia that means an Australian time zone (specifically, AEST, or GMT+10, aka their local time). So they're actually aiming to finish on Thursday afternoon Eastern American time.
Just a FYI, unless there's clarification somewhere that they were speaking of the American EST.
Former government phone monopoly, now privatized and run by evil Americans - Telstra, basically owns 99% of fixed-line infrastructure. (As they are legislated to do so) Captial cities got TWO separate cable networks during the 1990's - one from Optus (who got the first telco license after deregulation), and the other from Telstra, who built one thinking pay TV was the bomb - it wasn't, and both cable networks have actually shrunk by some degree since.
(Note the Optus cable network provided , and was designed to fixed line telephones from the start, which makes up the small percentage of non-Telstra fixed-line infrastuture around.)
However, Telstra, as a monopoly, MUST provide wholesale access to the fixed-line infrastructure, as such most Australians are actually with internet providers who wholesale off Telstra, either over Telstra DSLAM's or their own. The wholesale prices of which have been ENFORCED even DICTATED by the Australian competition authorities, who among other things, refuse to tolerate American crap such as "up to XXX mbps" (Australian consumers, unlike American's, demand full line speed, no lousy contention or else), "unlimited... up to XXX GB" etc.
A federal election issue this year is an FTTN (fibre-to-the-node) rollout to every single location within these captial cities, and an assortment of regional centers. Two proposals are in play - one from Telstra, who set wholesale prices up high because they don't want to share, and their shareholders (investment funds, small % of mon'n'dad investors) who want returns, and the "G9" - favored by many, but the pricing still sucks.
As the majority of Australian internet traffic is to/through the US, Australian bandwidth pricing is dictated by capacity on submarine cables to the US - of which there is only one - running out of "spare" capacity fast*, despite only being turned on a decade ago. Some providers lease additional capacity via Japan, and there are three new submarine cables under planning that are attempting to remedy the bandwidth shortage, either by going to Guam to patch into Japanese capacity, or only up to Hawaii. As I've said, unlike American's, Australian users, after suffering a few years of low broadband speeds, don't tolerate US style bandwidth overselling (those that have tried failed miserably), and as such a lot of ISPs, outside Telstra (who charge almost business rates anyway), we're forced to raise prices due to the increasing use of bittorrent etc.
* even worse the operators of the cable in question, Southern-Cross cable, aren't in a particular hurry to upgrade either.
This challenge would be great if they also had David Hasselhoff, Paula Abdul and John Schneider making comments after each piece of equipment installed.
Building something in a hurry is not an accomplishment in itself. Keeping it well-maintained is the real challenge.
Would you rather slap together a DIY PC in 15 minutes or spend time ensuring your cables are positioned to allow good airflow, etc? Same principle applies.
This is a great PR piece! Budding marketeers take note: "experiments" like this is a great way to get all kinds of free press. I hope the marketing team at Pipe gets a raise for this.
Duh...he just said bandwidth was expensive.
The story also says the 60-day period is just the construction time period, and not the planning behind it, etc. But whatever. They created some hype and it worked. It worked too well, apparently.
Do you think an article from Australia about an event IN Australia by an Australian company just might be enough context for EST to mean AEST? Sure, they should have used the correct *full* AEST but hey habit is as habit does.
And there is no "Eastern American Time", it's EST/EDT. if you feel the need to spell it out, it is "North American", don't forget the Canadians, eh?
Sorry mods, nothing insightful about the parent. Informative perhaps, but certainly not bearing any insight.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.