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Nuke Site Converted Into Green Data Center
1sockchuck writes "If you had 100,000 servers, would you put them on top of a former nuclear fuel facility? One of the world's largest web hosts, 1&1 Internet, is building a new data center on a site in Hanau, Germany previously used by Siemens to produce mixed oxide rods made from enriched uranium and plutonium. The site has been cleaned up, and 1&1 is converting it into a 'green' data center powered by renewable energy and using free cooling to save on air conditioning costs."
I cant hear the name Siemens without giggling
I hope they are using ECC...
1&1? They should worry more about where they site their customer service! I was with them for a while and when they screwed up my billing it took a long, long time to untangle the mess. Mainly because the different departments were all sited in different places and none had the authority to do what needed to be done to sort it out. 1&1 - hateful, money-grubbing company. Thank you, rant over. I will now pay the karma hit with pleasure.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
1&1 is also using "green" power generated from wind, water and solar energy for their datacenters and office buildings. see: (German only) http://www.1und1.info/xml/order/popupGruenerStrom
Oddly enough, TFA says nothing about the site being cleaned up.
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... and convert a Green Data Center into a Nuke Site.
THAT would be news.
When they said "Green Power", did they prefix it with "Glowing"?
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Does anyone else get the feeling that the summary wants us to react in a certain way?
Would you put your servers on the NUKELEURZ? WOULD YOU!?
I'm not feeling the fear here.
It's a former nuke producing facility.
It's green.
Is there anything to see here?
Well, wooot!
And what's their plan to deal with the Deep Crows?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Fission Batteries?
Hopefully it's a "lights out" facility.
I've read quite a bit about this whole idea of free cooling, and as far as I've been able to conclude, the basic premise is that the replacement cost for failures very much outweighs the costs for cooling it properly.
If you realize that the last decade or so, most components can easilly be overclocked with proper cooling, and will function quite well in a wide range of temperatures, it's not hard to imagine that operating temperatures of anywhere between -10C and +40C are generally fine for most equipment.
The only thing that would be affected, in the sense of less cleaning of air, would be movable parts components, like harddisks, fans, etc.
With the prices on HDDs and the ease of use and availability of any sort of RAID configuration you can think of, the actual costs for replacing these parts when they fail, could very well be a fraction of the costs that would be required to make them function 'properly'.
All in all it seems an economically very viable option, with the added advantage of using a lot less energy overall.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
I've never, ever heard about this company. Never have I even seen an ad with their name on.
Also, yes, I'm sure it will be very "green" - everyone knows the greenest way is to build and consume more, more, more and more. I'd like some details on the mention of this supposed use of "100% renewable energy".
This is marginally interesting, but light on specifics. I mean, the article claims that the new Data Center is going to use "renewable energy" to power it, however it doesn't explain what kind of renewable energy or how it's going to do so.
Furthermore, while the air side economizer is a great idea (and more data centers should be using it), there is no description of what supplemental, mechanical cooling there will be in this facility. I can't honestly believe that there will never be a need for any cooling other than what mother nature is providing. Sure, geographically, it's bound to be cooler than say the southwest U.S. but there are still apt to be days in the summer where temperatures make it implausible to be on "economizer only".
1) Stray residual gamma rays knocks more electrons out of circuit A than circuit B.
2) Resulting potential difference induces current.
3) Resutling current flips a bit.
4) Bit is saved on hard drive.
5) Data is corrupted.
7) ???
8) (Absence of) Profit!
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
that is unexplained, i usually say something like "probably a stray cosmic ray"
for the technically inclined, this usually elicits a laugh
for the technically uninclined this usually elicits a stony face of seriousness
try this comment sometime, its win win. its a good litmus test for the level of technical acumen you are dealing with in someone
however, these guys can actually say this sort of thing with a straight face: "probably a stray gamma ray"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There is a ton of places, like any northern places in Canada, where electricity is cheap and is really cool nearly all year long. I could think about Quebec province, in Canada. Electricity is approximatly 5 cents (canadian) per kw.h (like 4 cents US$) and it would cost nothing to cool down as much server as you want. Maybe some company already have such datacenters, but I could think about some google / microsoft datacenter going to canada, to save on electricity bills and cooling.
They can save energy by not having to turn the lights on.
Everything has it's own "natural" glow.
Hot water for the staff won't be a problem either.
Paul Leader
If this were on Digg, the headline would be "Data Center Built on Toxic Nuclear Death Swamp"
Then, you would see plenty of post that are dugg +300 saying how stupid they are, it's all Bush's fault, and Obama will fix everything.
You would also see comments that are burried -300 asking what's the big deal if they cleaned it up; nuclear, especially with today's technology is a viable energy source, and Bush had nothing to do with it.
Taxes. Canadian Business Taxes are really pretty bad. Don't think that Microsoft and Google haven't already crunched the numbers. In all likelihood the cooling and electricity savings are outweighed by increased regulation and taxation.
Does the old routine of 'hmm' walk over to the right side of the building, look out the window, squinting hard for 15 seconds, and simply saying 'damn sunspots' not work anymore?
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
Hey man, you're actually not half bad. A lot of things you wrote in the past, on Slashdot and kuro made me think you were an idiot, but as long as things don't get into social subjects you're pretty funny. Maybe it you'd get better results sticking to this kind of thing instead.
I suppose there are few evil people working on this right now. They probably do not mean data centres only either.
So no need for Ready Brek to make the sysadmins "Get up and Glow"
I can remember reading Dave Small (famous hardware hacker and entrepreneur, he made the MacIntosh emulator cartridge on the ATARI ST back in the days, also some 68030 accelerator cards) describing how he saw a character on his screen change in front of his eyes with no intervention, and attributed to a cosmic ray and his higher than normal altitude.
So this begs the question, although modern servers do have ECC memory to correct such occurences, couldn't there be a weaker link in the server chain somewhere that could be affected ?
Horrible company. poor customer 'service'. AVOID AT ALL COSTS!
I used to visit Hanau on business. I don't know whether it's changed, but it used to be full of nuclear engineers, metallurgists, and scientists working on some interesting technologies. In the (spotlessly clean) town centre (rebuilt completely after WW2) is a memorial to the Brothers Grimm, the philologists who collected the fairy tales. Hansel und Gretel are famous for stuffing the witch into her own oven, and one company in Hanau used to make extremely high temperature furnaces, but that's about the only connection I can make.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
were you actually some sort of authority, rather than an anonymous coward with an assumed sense of patronizing and condescending authority
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... and convert a Green Data Center into a Nuke Site.
Well do you think a Data Center looks like, once simultaneously hit by slashdot and a bot net ?
This has been done before. Repeatedly.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I used to get the cosmic ray answer from Motorola when one of our former systems would suffer a double-bit parity error and go TU. The first time the support weenie said it, it was mildly amusing, but by the third time they replaced all the memory, including swapping it with a system that nevercrashed, I figured out that it was their code phrase for "I don't know, I don't care, and I am going home." I have not had a Motorola system for eight years, and my cosmic ray problem left when they did. To me, that proves that Motorola was the weakest link.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
We could try to convert it back by slashdotting the data center.
What?
Cosmic rays? I always figure it's sun spots.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I would get this same reaction in my environmental engineering class concerning waste water treatment (gray to white not sewage to gray). Even though the engineering of the treatment plant was explained most of the students would not be willing to drink the water that came out of the facility even though it used RO or other methods that are used to purify water from natural sources. This makes absolutely no sense. Engineers who understand that all water is recycled anyway, and that there is no difference if it is done mechanically vs. naturally.
If as educated individuals we cannot sell ourselves on the safety of the procedures how do we ever expect the uneducated masses to accept them?
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
> 1&1 is converting it into a "green" data center
> powered by renewable energy
Wouldn't it be nice if we could all just plug our power cords directly into the ground like 1&1?
We also already have one of these in the US, a decommissioned underground facility converted to an ultra-secure datacenter with green power, http://usshc.com/ who also hosts a number of open source projects like http://jabber.org/ and has stellar service and commodity rates.
Actually, cosmic rays can and do cause errors. Muon flux where I live tends to be roughly one through your hand per second, and they're going a pretty hefty fraction of C. With memory size and transistors scaling further and further down, cosmic ray interference becomes a really big issue, which is why ECC is so important.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel1/16/6912/00278509.pdf?temp=x
We're dealing with more delicate technology these days; It's only gotten worse since then.
These guys think they are so smart, but if they hadn't cleaned up the site, they could have had free heating too.
No matter how well they clean it up I'm guessing that there are more alpha and beta particles flying around there than on some random previously empty piece of land. And with chip geometries smaller than ever this might be an issue.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...then it was already green.
I recall that back in the old days when expensive ICs were packaged in ceramic and cheap ones in plastic, cheap memory was less prone to bit errors because some of the ceramics contained, as it turned out, significant amounts of radioactivity. Potassium, for instance, is noticeably radioactive in its natural state (one of its isotopes is unstable).
Given that the concrete won't be made from raw materials collected on site, nor will the aluminum and steel in the server racks, and that the only really common beta emitter (tritium) produces electrons with less energy than those in an old style CRT, your fears are groundless.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Actually bit errors DO happen because of cosmic radiation. This is why ECC memory exists.
Most of us don't have offices with windows :(
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Traditionally secondary reactions from casing material caused more problems than direct strikes by cosmic rays themselves. Thankfully this has been resolved with new materials.
The problem still exists and is getting worse with mineaturization and an ever increasing target area (More capacity)
Does this mean there is free lighting after the employees start glowing from the radiation?
I wish I could have used it as a joke... I had to use it once as an excuse, because "we honestly don't have a fucking clue" was not a viable option. Two of our Netra T1s (at the time, these were new) decided to just flip out, just 5 seconds apart from each other.
We checked everything. Power monitoring, access loads, bad coding, intrusion detection, taking apart the data left on the HDD bit by bit to find anything odd. We even got the data center to release surveilance videos of the site in case some janitor didn't pull anything. (Which was ridiculous in the first place since it was in a locked cage with fully trained janitor staff that knew what they were doing.) We used all our "inside" contacts to see if there wasn't anything odd going on (that couldn't be publicized) regarding the hardware and software, from people that CERTAINLY would know, at Sun.
We had to have an answer. But we didn't. So we found one. "Sun spot activity has been high, and the architecture of the server.. blah blah blah." Believe it or not, it wasn't that hard to say with a straight face, considering we hadn't slept for nearly a week. And, as you would have guessed, the client had a stone cold look on their face as they asked us how it could be prevented. In order to cover our rear ends in the event that it may happen again (it did...), we made sure to mention that there was no practical way to protect against the acts of god, but they needed something to report to THEIR managers... so we decided to place thick panels of lead over the cage. That was the summit of all stupid things I had ever done, and it made me want to crawl into a cave and stay there, out of sheer humiliation. Luckily, the tech staff at the data center were quite sympathetic.
> If you had 100,000 servers, would you put them on top of a former nuclear fuel facility?
If you had 100,000 servers, would you put them on top of a former toaster factory?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This is exactly why Intel patented a method to protect chips from cosmic rays.
Oddly enough, TFA says nothing about the site being cleaned up.
I hear the site gets glowing reviews.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
In upstate NY they're transforming the part of the Seneca Army Depot that was once the largest storage site for tactical nuclear weapons into secure data centers. The weapon bunkers are 4 feet thick concrete surrounded by triple barbed wire electric fence. I got a tour of the place while shopping for a disaster recovery facility. Cool stuff...
Taking the dull answer of "have a failover box somewhere else" would be an act of cowardice.