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Building a Data Center In 60 Days

Posted by kdawson on from the 170-racks-and-nothin'-on dept.

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."

15 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. why? by thedrunkensailor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:why? by Aladrin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Why not? It's a challenge, not a true 'deadline'. Think of it as an episode of 'Monster House' where they get to keep the tools if they get the nearly-impossible project done on time. There's -always- work to be done afterwards to finish it off, but the work is complete as far as they were contracted.

      It's not 'have a fully functional data center filled with customers.' It's only 'build it.'

      --
      "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
  2. What's burning? by Max+Romantschuk · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh, it's just the server going up in smoke trying to serve a live webcam on Slashdot...

    --
    .: Max Romantschuk :: http://max.romantschuk.fi/
    1. Re:What's burning? by Thox · · Score: 4, Funny

      60 day project set back to day 0 due to fire damage.

    2. Re:What's burning? by Kerto · · Score: 5, Informative

      Last month the PIPENetworks site reported that they had installed a temporary ADSL connection for the webcam. I guess that's what it's still using. Mirrordot: http://mirrordot.org/stories/948bdf7529da4432c4216 0f0c33166c1/index.html

  3. A couple black boxes by mikaelhg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They could also just have bought a couple of Sun Black Box datacenters in a truck container.

  4. Checklist by WillRobinson · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  5. Datacenter???? by Critical+Facilities · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Pipe's DC3 facility will be about 4,800 square feet and will be able to accommodate 170 server racks.

    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".
    1. Re:Datacenter???? by Xicarius · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In Australia, its a datacentre. Comparative to the number of people in Au & the connections within Australia & to the rest of the world, its pretty big.

      We only have two major cables out of Australia & capacity on them to the US costs hundreds of dollars a megabit/month.

  6. Make a TV reality show by yohanes · · Score: 4, Funny

    Everyone is doing that, why shouldn't they. Then we can fire managers that we hated the most.

    --
    -- tinyhack.com
  7. Sun has your covered there by invisik · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Sun has your covered there by eln · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, it requires "chilled water." I took a tour of this thing when it came to the local Sun campus, and it really is quite an amazing piece of engineering. Basically, you need one (small) cargo container for the data center itself, and a chiller for the water. They are able to carry the cargo container and a chiller around in a standard sized 18-wheeler. Obviously, if you were trying to take this into a disaster area, you'd need another truck or two to carry generators and fuel.

      Inside the building, they had a bunch of photoshopped pictures of these black boxes in various locations like on top of an offshore oil rig, stacked 3 high in a warehouse, and sitting on top of a skyscraper. The photoshopping was fairly good, but you could tell the photos were faked, mostly because at the time only 2 black boxes had actually been built, and one of them was outside in the parking lot.

  8. Time zones by Xiroth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:Trunk delivery timeframe by mcbridematt · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  10. He didn't want to block the tubes! by adamofgreyskull · · Score: 4, Funny

    Duh...he just said bandwidth was expensive.