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Startup Building Floating Data Centers
1sockchuck writes "A Bay Area startup is planning to build data centers on cargo container ships, which would be docked at piers in major Internet markets. The company, known as IDS (International Data Security) says it plans to use biodiesel to power its generators and use heat from equipment to manage temperature on board the ships, reducing their reliance on grid power. IDS is telling prospects that it hopes to eventually have more than 20 floating data centers docked at ports around the U.S."
I bet you could sell server space on one of these to thepiratebay...
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Sick of stable data centers inland, free from the excitement that comes from not knowing whether your data center will survive the latest hurricane or tropical storm? Tired of never meeting interesting longshoreman on your way to work? Try our new data center model!
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a server farm under tow!
(latency's a bitch, though)
wouldnt this leave them far more open to forms of terrorism? i.e. if these floating data centers hosted say, all the websites that godaddy.com host (which is alot), and someone "cut the cable" which would be alot easier to find on a ship, since it has to come out of the ship somewhere... all these websites would instantly go online, where in a building, the cable would come in, underground, directly into the rooms the data center occupies. ships are easier to sink that buildings are to destroy.
if the ships use wireless rather than wired, there would need to be a large antenna on the ship, which would:
1. be a target for everyone
2. allow people to intercept any connection.
portfolio
"[...] docked at piers in major Internet markets."
Why would anyone ship data to a major internet market when you can just send it via an attachment? Duh...
You sunk my dataship!
I hope this idea floats, I hope they have enough liquid assets...
Oh the puns! I can't resist!
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I wonder just how well one of Suns' "Black Box" containers will last in a salty environment. Salt air corrodes just about everything. The container is built for it, but you'd have to be careful about not opening the doors too often. Putting a data center into a naval environment, even one just rocking at a pier, is a lot more challenging then one in a building away from the shore. There's going to be a lot of cabling going onshore and that will all have to be maintained in ways that you don't have to do when there's no water involved.
One of their founders is an ex-Navy guy so maybe they've got it all wired. However, I don't think the Navy uses off-the-shelf stuff and buying navalized equipment is a lot more expensive then the just you get at Fry's.
Why bother with biodiesel? Cargo ships use bunker oil, which is 1 step up from crude. They'll already have massive generators and massive fuel capacity, with readily available fuel.
If they really wanted to be green they'd deploy some sort of thermal gradient generator, sinking piping down below the thermocline of the ocean.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Ship's Register: Floating Point
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I'm going to reply to your post, because you made some salient points. It would do us well to remember that the US Navy has a lot of floating data centers. If anyone here thinks that those Naval war vessels are not brimming with electronics, I urge you to think again. In a barge type setup, you can create climate controlled spaces with little difficulty.
As for redundancy, I think you are unsure of how vulnerable land based data centers are currently. Even if you bring in large circuits from competing companies, the chances that the local municipality has organized that they both run main fibers along the same railway is high. Power redundancy? Are you serious? Battery backup and generator backed UPS is all you have anyway.
With a barge setup, your redundancy plan can be to move the whole data center to another area with fiber connections waiting to fire up. In fact, in case of a hurricane, I'd assume that would be the plan anyway. Sure, that means a 24hr downtime, unless you have redundant barges in your plan, in which case it's all a mute argument. If you think 24hr downtime is a long time, try figuring out what Californians just suffered when so many parts of a normally dry network infrastructure were sitting under 3+ feet of water. My company just suffered from that storm last weekend, so don't tell me that land based data centers are less vulnerable.
I think it could well work out wonderfully.
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Wow. This idea is completely out-of-the-box.
I have questions:
1. Why locate off-shore when there is plenty of space on land?
2. Who is going to pay the port fees? Not including the tow fees necessary to periodically reposition the vessel.
3. Why take the hit on maintenance? Periodic dry docking, corrosion management, bilge checks...
4. Why pay additional expenses for a vessel agent? (They are NOT cheap).
5. What about mooring? evacuations due to hurricanes? environmental impact (ballast water & bunkering)?
6. Why take the risk associated with being in navigable water (vessel collision, dredging)?
7. Insurance?
8. On the subject of decommissioned cargo ships -- Most cargo ships are decommissioned only after they are in such sad shape that the operators fear that metal fatigue may jeopardize the vessel, or the safety systems have deteriorated to the point that the cost of repairs (to make them pass coast guard inspection) are too high. Why not use deep sea barges like Odysea, Crowley TMT, or Land Bridge uses? Less maintenance, and you won't have to hire three tugs to reposition the damn thing.
Just asking...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Startup Building Floating Data Centers
That's nice, but is there a demand for data centers that store only one type of number? What if we need to store integers?
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Don't forget how easy it will be for Soviet subs to ping our servers. At least they should be safe from Land attacks.
Except that they appear to be researching their locations pretty carefully. San Francisco does not have hurricanes or tropical storms as the water around it is too shallow to hold all the energy. Besides, the Bay is just that: A bay. I don't know if you've ever been to SF, but pier 50 is way south well inside the bay. It is very safe.
The land in that area is another issue. San Francisco was nearly completely leveled a couple of times in the 20th century alone by earthquakes.
I think that the data-center on ships idea is great...
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
The Navy is not exactly hurting for money, and they justify the expense since the electronics are located near its users. This venture is needlessly placing the data center on water, when the data users are mostly land based.
You will have more options on land. First of all, why place the containers on a ship when a container yard will do? Need to move the data centers to another location... Hire a truck!
You are looking at least a 48 to 72 hour downtime (if you are lucky). Being on a large container vessel (TFA is talking about decommissioned container ships), you will need to sail far enough away from the hurricane. Keep in mind the current state of hurricane predictions, the time it takes to disconnect from shore, scheduling a bar pilot, tow, bunkering, and sailing to destination. Once you reach the destination, waiting for bar pilot to board, tow, mooring, and making data connections to shore...
You could have co-located your data center in another region and switched to them during your emergency... Save the expense of vessel movement and the additional risks involved in ocean transportation. Better yet, use a container and truck your data center to another location further inland... Container based data centers are a neat idea, Container shipped based data center is an idea that went too far.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
I agree with you to a certain extent, but I think it comes back to economies of scale. When you factor in maintenance costs for ocean-based vessels, on top of the fact that many land-based data centers are now being built in areas with many cost advantages (being built near large quantities of dark fiber, being built on cheap land, built near energy sources or near areas where renewable energy sources are/will be available, being built to minimize maintenance costs on the infrastructure itself, etc.) I'm not sure that a floating data center is going to be cost-effective.
Not only that, but the vulnerabilities on a floating data center are going to be, at a minimum, the exact same if not higher. The data connections are going to be exposed, no matter what you do. At least in a land-based data center the fiber is buried, and less obvious. Not only that, but physical security can be made (and is made) relatively difficult in a land based data center, at least directly surrounding it. A floating entity would have a far higher risk of approach due to the traffic that occurs on the water near a port.
As far as exposure to attack on fiber, well, I can tell you the exact man-hole in the city where I live that you can toss an IED and take down virtually every carrier in the market. Those don't exist simply at data centers, but everywhere, due to decisions decades ago that have caused choke points in fiber distibution.
I'd also question the ready availability of dark fiber at a port from multiple carriers. While I don't know as I've never looked at it, it seems to me that ports, being quasi-government facilities, probably weren't wired with fiber with multiple carriers, let alone all the big carriers, as most major data centers are. You might have 2 or 3, but I'd guess that's under contract and the number of directly available carriers is still low. This is a disadvantage for a vendor-neutral data-center that would likely want/need connectivity to all the big boys to entice customers. This might not be true if the port is a launch point for inter-continental fiber, but certainly that's not the case at most ports.
Bill
Japanese electronics companies used to have cargo ships with mainframes which performed data processing tasks in international waters near San Francisco. (Back when Japanese labor costs were low, and computers were rare enough that there was benefit to having a mobile computer.)
a container ship filled with 9-track tapes... :-)
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It weighs about 175 million pounds. Take it out into the open seas where there are 3-foot waves, or actually big enough waves to lift and drop the ship by three feet say every ten seconds. By my Excel calcs, if you use that lift to heave up on a big anchor half the weight of the ship, that's about 30 megawatts of electricity. Plenty enough to power tens of thousands of servers.
The front boiler and engine room spaces of the QM were cleared out long ago, leaving a huge open space for lots of server racks. All you have to worry about is shipwrecks and hurricanes and the effects of humid, salty and diesely air.
I think they could air condition the server rooms and take care of this issue. However, I don't think this idea makes much sense. Ships are very expensive to maintain and keep from rusting away. With all the work associated with wastage (rusting), keeping a ship painted etc. I can't understand how this could be cheaper than an office building. They will also probably need a master (captain) 24/7 on the vessel, even though it is tied to the dock unless they do some monkey business with their ship class. As for the idea of using diesel power; the power company can make electricity cheaper than you can. That's why they're the power company. Large datacenters pay the industrial rate (cheaper), not the consumer rate.
I don't see any huge advantages either. You're still in US waters so you're still under US law. They claim to use extra heat from the engine to heat the ship, but with all that electrical equipment there shouldn't be a need to. Electrical rooms in ships can get very warm. If anything they will need extra AC above what a shore facility would need. Plus, in the event of a disaster like a hurricane or earthquake, the fiber line to shore will probably have issues anyway somewhere.
I could go on, but these are the biggest issues. Why yes, I am a marine engineer.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Perhaps they just got a little confused about the offshoring trend...
Then clearly they didn't want to sell to TPB because they needed to construct additional pylons...
Because "bio-diesel" sounds niffy, cutting edge, and enviro-friendly. Just the sorta thing that a bay-area tech exec who has money to spend will latch on to. Not to mention that bio-diesel will help them achieve enterprise-level scalability, lower TCO, and higher ROI by leveraging eco-friendly synergies.
Maybe they'll use a subnet.
But those processors mostly keep burning more and more electricity even though they take less space, so these days the problem is electricity, including per-square-foot density problems and total power demand including cooling, which is why companies like Google have been looking at locating data centers in places where power's cheap.
It's amusing how we keep recycling technical problems. Virtualization has been one of the main buzzwords of the past few years, but it's really just a way to re-invent timesharing, using 2000s microprocessors instead of 1970s minicomputers. A decade and a half ago, if you wanted to locate computers and datacomm gear in a telco office to reduce your communication costs or make your services more reliable, you went through a big detailed study on how much power and cooling you needed, how many square feet, how many phone and data lines, etc. Within a few years the hosting market had evolved enough that we knew that a standardized customer network looked like 19" rack-mounted PCs and Cisco routers, and the power and cooling needs per square foot were pretty much the same for everybody, and it changed a bit with 1U servers but we could still usually stretch the available power. But now? We're back to servers that are increasingly customized and non-standard (disks vs. routers vs. blade servers are much different power densities, etc.)
Bill Stewart
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CERT-advisory on limpet mines.
New April 1st RFC - floating point transfers over sub-nets.
The network is obviously pier to pier-based, you need good piering agreements.
Connection reset by pier.
The data center is down due to wetware failure.
Special offer - free salt for all your crypto needs.
Careful with that firewall, closed ports are bad.
"Digital Pirates" just acquired a new meaning.
The Dreaded Backhoe will be replaced by people phishing on the pier and people dropping <A>s
Sneakernet replaced by flippernet.
Overclockers rejoice, think of the extreme water-cooling possibilities.
Forget the Boston Tea Party. The Boston LAN Party will be way cooler.
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That was a good post. Better than I deserved. That's what I get for being a smarty-pants.
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