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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'!"
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.
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.
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.
So no need for Ready Brek to make the sysadmins "Get up and Glow"
... 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 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.
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."
Alpha particles are pretty large entities, being helium nuclei (two protons and two neutrons), as a result can only travel a few centimetres through air so any machine's case will stop them completely.
Beta particles are electrons or positrons) and can reach about 9 metres through air but less than 5mm through aluminium.
-- Soruk
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.