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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
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?
And what's their plan to deal with the Deep Crows?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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
Surely! The servers already glow green!
My blog
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.
Just another massively-over-selling, no-customer-service rock bottom webhost for people who want a brochure site and not much more, as far as I can see. Nothing special about them...
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
They're mainly European and if my previous history with them is anything to go by, they're a fly-by-night, domains-and-hosting-for-£1 outfit that has little or no technical acumen and is mainly for small business or mass-domain sales direct to personal customers.
I once had a dedicated "root" Linux server with them which I never got working for its intended purpose because their initial setup was dire (outdated Plesk, kernel, Apache, etc. all with serious remotely-exploitable security flaws), their support was atrocious (wouldn't even know what Apache was half the time and their answer to everything was "you have a dedicated server, you do it" unless you were asking them to reboot and even then you had to fight). Which wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for the fact that the supplied server came with insecure software by default (and I'm talking about several-year-old flaws) and the only available updates (specially hosted on their privately-accesible servers only to dedicated customers, including updates to the pay-for software and part of the support contract) for their customised-kernel/userspace/Plesk etc. specifically said not to install them AT ALL without actual physical access (one specifically mentioned "DO NOT DO THIS VIA SSH", which was the only access I had).
Their dedicated server support line couldn't understand the problem, wanted me to just run it anyway (they charged for rebuilds), refused to do anything more than reboot if it went wrong (and the nature of the update specified that if it went wrong, a simple reboot would do NOTHING because it updated so much stuff), refused to supply a server with a newer image or to upgrade it, and sometimes couldn't even understand simple technical terms. So I had a choice - run a high-power, high-bandwidth, Internet-facing server with well-known, long-established serious security flaws in all the important software (and suffer their charges if the server was compromised and started spewing spam), or attempt a massive upgrade party with hundreds of updates remotely via SSH where several of them specifically state not to do it remotely (and get charged if it needs to be restored from their backup, even if just to a bootable state so that I could restore *my* backups).
Needless to say, I chose the third option: tell them to stick it where the sun don't shine. Letters of complaint to head office went unanswered or (if sent recorded delivery) received the vaguest of replies which basically said "We don't care, we can do no wrong, you still owe us money even though you couldn't use the server, because you're a 'dedicated server' customer we won't do anything to help you, ever.", etc. I even have a soundbite on a phone call to the support line where the chief technical bod on the special "dedicated server support line" actually refuses to state what it is that they COULD do for me. "Can you reboot my server if I ask?" "Can you restore from backup?" "Can you shut the machine down?" "Can you filter a DDoS attack if I get hit?" "What questions do you ACTUALLY answer?"... every single answer was the same... "I can't tell you that, sir". I mean, seriously, what the hell kind of answer is that?
Needless to say, I never used them ever again and like to pull out the story whenever I hear their name.
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'
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 ?
Seconded, same expirience here, in germany.
Apparently the business model of selling crappy products without any support is kinda successful all around the world...
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?
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."
That was my thought... soft errors in general may or may not be an actual problem worth considering (although I know lots of people research solutions, so somebody must believe in it)... but if you're on top of a site which probably still has active radiation, I'd think it would be a bigger issue.
...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."
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)
I've used them as Schuland Partner AG when I was working in Germany, although the accounts were on Solaris at the time with few problems and hosted a number of personal sites on their shared hosting up until 2004 or 2005. My old comapny had a dedicated server with them and had a few problems. On paper they had (and still do) have the best price on dedicated server hosting when you compare between companies. But if anything goes wrong, you're screwed. We had a hard disk fail and tried to get it replaced. Meanwhile our customers were bitching at us because their site was down. I had warned the boss about this previously. We had to contact their tech support for something minor once before and we finally got ahold of someone in the dedicated server department that could actually speak english. (They do all their tech support out of the far east)
We ended up going elsewhere and when the next bill came in, the boss put a stop payment with American Express. He explained the reasoning that 1and1 had not lived up to a reasonable expectation of delivered service and AE agreed. 1and1 still sent it to collections. (It still never got paid as far as I know).
Their customer service is beyond useless and their control panel features are always lagging behind everyone else. I know about a year ago, they added "Click-n'build" application of common programs like Joomla, etc.. Kind of like Fanastico in Cpanel. Well, there's a catch, with their click and build you get their default config. Just try to add plug-ins or new themes....you can't.
Where I work now came across them when we were pricing out dedicated servers. I was pushing for Pair Networks, but the $350 vs. $99 a month kept the owner making me justify why one costs three time as much for arguably less services. At least on Paper. I've been using Pair Networks since 1998. They've always been expensive, but I've never had to wait more than 20 minutes for a problem to be fixed either. Especially in set up costs (we needed a few extra ports installed and Pair Networks only does managed servers. Want an extra Port installed, it's $50).
It's an argument that I initially lost. The guy is a small business owner and has started 2 other successful businesses, but he has never dealt in the technology world before where time kills. So we have a dedicated server at 1and1. So far no problems, and I have to say that things are a bit better than the last time I used them other than their software offerings are a bit out of date. Still, the ability to reimage and the off site back ups work. We back up nightly to the 1and1 FTP server and then back up to our internal back-up system every 2 hours. We can switch from the 1and1 dedicated system to the one in the office in less than 20 minutes and we've tested this just to make sure. I've been through the week long nightmare once before if a hard disk fails.
Now that we have enough clients that we know that the business is going to fly, I am now fighting the battle to get everything moved to Pair Networks when we launch the next version of our system. He's since read a few reviews of 1and1 and has come to realize that they can't be trusted.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
> 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.
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
Providing excellent service is expensive. If you can get a dedicated server with shitty service for $100/month and amazing support for $500/month, which one are you going to contract for? Clearly, as WalMart, LEGO, and any odd number of quality vs price examples have shown, the cheaper option.
I disagree. Providing good or excellent service is primarily a one-time investment and, more importantly, a conscious effort.
Sane processes (billing, inquiries, product-changes, etc.) need to be designed and implemented only once. Ideally most of them don't even need human interaction but can be solved through web forms especially for a virtual product like this.
Then maintaining these processes is rather cheap. Callcenter agents don't cost much in the big picture.
Taking the dull answer of "have a failover box somewhere else" would be an act of cowardice.
Have you ever seen the churn rates at callcenters? Using minimum wage callcenter agents for your business may work when you can build it into your cost and write off the customer goodwill (i.e. GoDaddy, 1&1, $insert_poor_customer_service_company_of_your_choosing).
I own a boutique web hosting firm. We're on track to do around $10 mil this year in revenue. We specialize in Fortune 500/5000 companies and the federal government. I wouldn't dare think about simply putting a process in place and hiring the cheapest person I could find if I wanted to keep my customer base. My customers came to us because they wanted amazing service. That doesn't come from process. Amazing service comes from your employees, and if you're in the service business and don't believe that, you don't belong in the service business.
That's all fine and dandy but 1&1 is not in the "service business". They're in the mass market webhosting business.
I don't exactly need a key account manager on the line to pitch their $9.99 "premium" package to me when all I want is cancel my damn account or get 2MB more diskspace.
A simple web- or PBX-based dialog-system works wonders in that setting, as some of the competitors have realized long ago.
The callcenter agents serve merely as fallback for mouthbreathers who fail on the PBX and grandma's who really need a human voice (even if it has a foreign accent) to understand anything.
It's obviously an entirely different story when you're selling premium products for $1000+ a shot...
They save a lot of money on the night shift. No need for lights when the walls glow fluorescent green.
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."