Slashdot Mirror
What Kind of Data Center Can You Build With $500M?
coondoggie writes "So, if the government gave your company $500 million to spend on building a new data center what would you buy and how would you build it? Well, the Social Security Administration is about to find out. As part of the stimulus bill, or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the SSA got the tidy little sum to replace its National Computer Center. The SSA in fact says it will need closer to $800 million to fund a new IT infrastructure, including the new data center — the physical building, power and cooling infrastructure, IT hardware, and systems applications. (This is addition to a $72 million backup facility currently under construction in Durham, North Carolina)."
I will start with the assumption that this data center must be non-homogeneous. Get an assessment of all the projects that are using the current system you're going to replace (you know, the one with 36 million lines of COBOL code?). Because the number one priority of the customer (other projects) is going to be the lengthy transition from that to current technology. Prepare yourselves for this: Some of the projects aren't going to have any funding to do jackshit. Which means that the awesome spaghetti coded current system that's held together with COBOL duct tape needs to remain intact in some form. Not ideal situation but an uncomfortable truth. I'm thinking you would want to set aside 10% or $50 million or so for this (just throwing out a figure).
My work here is dung.
At $8.95/45 specimens (http://sciencekit.com/harvester-ants%2C-live/p/IG0034483/), the newly constructed Hex would have the most powerful neural net we've ever seen!
But that wouldn't leave any money for the clacks...
No, really. That's it.
Could you approach Google and ask them to license their ideas on server and data 'pod' technology for your sharded databases? I'm not saying build the whole thing like this but with $500 million, you could probably have a large section to search and sharded databases that mimics Google. I don't think there's anything wrong with following the leader in that department. This probably isn't the best solution for relational databases so I would think another architecture would be in place for your MySQL and Postgres traditional database layouts. And that would be just huge centralized servers running virtualized instances of Linux with MySQL or Postgres.
My work here is dung.
Die Hard 4 pretty much set the standard for design here.
...when you could have two for twice as much?
OK, actually two 250 million dollar datacenters, but I love that quote from Contact.
Why tie up that much money in one site when you could build two world class structures and have full redundancy?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Build? I'd take it as a retention bonus and retire. I just want to immulate our most sucessful bankers.
At the price of 8.95/45 ants (http://sciencekit.com/harvester-ants%2C-live/p/IG0034483/), we could build the biggest neural net for Hex that the world has ever seen! But then again, we'd need to leave some funds for the clacks...
"God does not play Minecraft with the world." - Albert Einstein
Finally! An appropriate Slashdot story to respond with the Sharks meme!
Yeah... I spend $499 million on computers/networks/power/air conditioning/ etc.
But definitely $1 million dollars would be on Sharks with Frikken lasers
Putting the operation in a location that is cost effective would make the taxpayers very happy. The DC area is too expensive. Maybe an old missile facility in Wyoming or the Dakotas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantrap Mantraps...?
Then spend the rest on hookers and blow.
Hey, the gov't does that all the time, why are you staring at me like that??
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
This is a really really bad place to ask how to spend $500000000....
Find an industry that would otherwise need a gas fired boiler and on-sell the heat.
Other options:
- Heated public swimming pool
- Source of community/public heating
I bet they could do it for less, and on schedule.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/02/googles-data-center-secrets-revealed/
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Data Center: $10M*
Hookers and Beer: $490M
*I reckon I could get that down to $6M by cutting corners though, so that's another $4M for the beer :)
Summation 2
A bewolf cluster of all the ideas above plus the sharks whit friking lasers.
200m for me, 200m for you, 100m for the guy in India who builds a data center.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
EDM.
...but I'll bet you $500 million that: 1) It won't be nearly enough money; 2) It will be obsolete before it is finished; 3) It won't be finished before Social Security runs completely out of money (which will coincide nicely with my scheduled retirement); 4) [Fill in the blank]
or they could contract it out to google.
someone who knows how to manage large data centers correctly.
Dislaimer: I have worked for a contractor to the Air Force, and I have some insight as to government bidding, contracting, and results.
Well, if I were responsible for results, I would get requirements from staff, send out RFPs, hire the best people, manage the project, and deliver on time and on budget a state-of-the-art data center.
If I worked for the government, I would do the following:
- Find a company I would like to work for as a six-figure lobbyist, and hire them without regard to experience or practicality. I will have personal contacts with the CEO, and if I don't, I soon will.
- Get my "requirements" from that company, and have them provide the solution they specialize in without looking at my environment.
- I would not supervise them. I am too important for that.
- I would ask for more money as the project spirals out of control. The government would give it to me.
- The project would drag on for a decade, would never finish, and would ultimately get scrapped. I wouldn't care, because I now work for the vendor, lobbying the government for more projects. I get my own private limo and driver, and I don't have to declare it on my taxes, unless I want a very visible government job again.
Someone might raise a fuss in the public about this, but all that proves is that the government need more money to fix it.
P.S. The contractor I worked for beat out a lower-bidding, "women-owned", "development-zoned", and much more local company. By any government calculus, the local company should have won the bid hands-down. But there were, shall we say, non-written reasons the local company lost and the gigantic out-of-state, double-the-bid, next door to DC company won.
Commodity hardware
Full virtualization at the OS level
And a second, mirrored data center on the other side of the country
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
I'd by 5 Macs ...
(I love Macs, but damn ...)
For $500M I'd go for a nice laptop, on a beach, on my own private island. Maybe a NAS system with a few TB of storage and WiFi coverage for the island, couple of big screens on dedicated computers here and there, and possibly a cluster of Core i7 boxes to play with some heavy crunching.
All told, $499.5M could go toward the real-estate and construction costs, staff, transportation, etc. $500K would cover my compute hardware needs quite nicely.
When you analyze what the SSA ends up doing with $500M, you might find a shockingly similar pattern of administrative and facilities overhead.
a couple of tickets to a non-extradition country please. and an italian sportscar that gets really shitty gas mileage. fuck you tree hugging hippies.
My other sig is a knife wound.
its basically a madness engine if its for social security....
that having been said i would secure my place as a microsoft certified partner early!
Good people go to bed earlier.
The AC beat me to it: the Woodlawn data warehouse is diagrammed perfectly in Live Free or Die Hard.
They could hire Justin Long (and John Hodgman?) to conduct guided tours...
A lot of it will probably go to umbrella consultancy fees: spend $100m to learn how to spend $450m wisely among 'carefully chosen suppliers'. Yes, I know that adds up to $550m.
To build a new data center for the Social Security Administration all you need is $200M for immigration lawyers to draft legislation to lift the H-1b cap, $200M to buy Congressmen to pass it
I really don't get your point (or the joke, if there is one), but it's worth pointing out that influencing elected officials doesn't cost millions (short of large scale lobbying campaigns). If you glance at the political contributions received by influential politicians, you'll see amounts that are generally small.
To take one influential and well monied example, Chuck Schumer largest contributor was Citigroup. Obviously, the subject of how money gets collected and targeted is more complicated, but you can go down the list and see for yourself how most contributions are in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
Now if you want to complain about the corrosive influence of money, stop to consider that the cost of a campaign (read "keeping your job") can be more or less attributable to voters needing TV commercials (non free in the US) to be informed and persuaded. Like most things, the cause and solution to most problem are found in the mirror.
Congress has already bankrupted the SSA fund, so all they need is one computeer that can add and subtract "0" very quickly....unless they need something that can divide by zero :)
I'll never see a dime of the money that's being extracted from me under threat of force by my own government under the pretense of caring for me in my old age, but at least the fat, seeping, sore-encrusted pussies in Congress and the White House can carry on the charade a little longer and keep raiding the Social Security Trust to finance deficit spending. Hey Obama, here's a reality check: our children will NOT look upon this time as the time America turned the corner into a new era of prosperity and enlightenment. They will look upon it as the time their parents robbed them blind and sold them into financial servitude to China.
and yes, they'll play doom.
seriously though, I'd buy google data crates. one to match each US representative and then I'd place them across the US in those areas, which is the best indicator of population coverage.
Then I'd spend the leftovers on an underground lair.
They're using their grammar skills there.
There are tons of already built data centers that have been abandoned. They already have much of the infrastructure required and just need some TLC. Using these already built data centers will allow one to have more than one data center, very important for disaster recovery, multi homing, and impressing your customers with your size. I would avoid building a new building from the ground up. Its a cost that will add no value considering the number of buildings available that can be repurposed.
Make strong investments to make sure you can meet you power requires and can readily add more power in a reasonable amount of time. This includes battery piles, back up generators, fuel storage, and maybe even solar panels. Investigate new energy efficient cooling.
It's also important that your data center have easy access to multiple carriers. Look for buildings that used to be ISP central in the late 90s and early 00's. Often these buildings will also already have supporting infrastructure.
DO NOT BY INTO HYPE. Not everything needs to be cat6e or fiber. Use these were required and use cheaper technologies that have specs that will meet the requirement.
Invest services that will add value to your customers. DNS, backups, router maint, firewall sevices, remote hands, terminal services, etc... Dont be afraid to sell your customer shelves, servers, etc... But for god sake, give them screws if they ask. This simple gesture goes a long way to make you not look like small time asshats.
One of the biggest investments you can make is in a person who has real experience in the area and has the ability to get things done. Without someone who understands power, cooling, how to terminate various connections, telco, racks, project management, etc. your project is doomed to failure. Investing in a NOC that isnt full of monkeys will also be a great benefit. (keep them engaged with training and give them a sense of worth and you will create a team loyal to you. Abuse them and they will talk shit to anyone who listens). And your sales engine has to be stocked with people who can sell the services you are selling and can answer basic questions about those services. It might be a good idea to prove that you can sell these services before even breaking ground on the data center to begin with.
Don't over invest and over build. Plan for the future, and use profits to build the next stage. Look at what is coming down the sales pipe and try to predict when you need to add on. Buy customer cabinets and wire them only after the sale has been made.
This could be a great time to invest in experimental technologies for cooling, or to avoid cooling, solar power, etc. It all depends on what the building you find can and will accommodate. But its the bottom line you must always consider. Lots of dotbombs had grand ideas and good intentions and ended up just pissing away all their investors money. Dont dech your NOC out like it was the helm of the enterprise. Dont have large screen TVs and projectors displaying data that the NOC gets alerts on their work stations for.
Oh, and seriously, dont be a jerk about letting your customers use the bathroom, vending machines, and whatever. And have some comfortable couches in the vending area that support rest and work. Some of your customers are going to pull all nighters and there is nothing worse than having to sleep on the floor in a puddle of your own waste chewing on a pizza crust found in the trash.
Have real test gear on hand. If you cannot test a t1, ds3, dsl, pots, ethernet/fiber/coax, throughput, etc you will cause your employees and customers a lot of grief. I'd also put some money aside for a fiber fusion splicer, but dont buy it until you need it.
Data centers can be extremely profitable. I know of one company who I believe had their data centers initial investment paid for with just a few customers in 4 months, after that they began to see profit. Those times might be a bit off, but not by much. (The data center in question I am talking about is in cleveland/garfield. Another option might be to partner with a successful company in another area.)
Cardboard box, tin cans and string.
I'd then proceed to give the rest to support the bailout of the severely ailing and deserving auto and financial institutions.
sb
Rather than dumping more money into social security, they should cash everyone out with what's left and shut it down.
Socialism is a losing proposition; I say cut our losses and spend that money on converting from an income tax to a flat sales tax, which would get rid of the IRS too.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Just a mote?! Must be microscopic sharks...
Give away almost 5000 pcs or maybe more.....
With conditions pc must remain on 24/7 , they must pay for Internet service - and allow use of grid computing software.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
cooling cost - almost 0
power cost - almost 0
Mark
What kind of data center would I build with $500M? I don't know, but I imagine it might look something like this...
Of course you would want to have a moat filled with Sharks with Frick'en Laser Beams mounted to their heads!!
If it's that cheap to buy Congressmen then just reallocate $150M from buying Congressmen to buy more H-1bs so we can dispense with the datacenter entirely: Just have a huge call center with people instead of 'pooterz! More Green Jobs!
Seastead this.
*Sigh* judging from your rating no one got this Austin Powers reference
Just the other day I was doing back-of-the-envelope calculations about what you could do with huge amounts of storage.
With drive space costing around $100/terabyte some interesting things seem quite feasible, for example IMDB has around 700,000 titles listed. A full DVD rip of each and every one would use around 5 petabytes at a cost of a little over half a million dollars. Half a billion buys you enough space for a 2 hour biography of every living person on the planet, but you would have to use 700mb rips :)
What kind of data does the social security administration have that requires a $500 million dollar data center? For $500 million you can get yourself an AWFUL lot of computing power, but I have to think that the VAST majority of the processing that we're talking about here is simple accounting and administrativa.
To build a new data center for the Social Security Administration all you need is $200M for immigration lawyers to draft legislation to lift the H-1b cap, $200M to buy Congressmen to pass it
I really don't get your point (or the joke, if there is one), but it's worth pointing out that influencing elected officials doesn't cost millions (short of large scale lobbying campaigns).
Are you the bum with no sense of humor thats modding all the Cynics as trolls? If I must explain, he says that you can you can build a huge data center with immigrants and old XP boxes networked together. Yes, there Do exist Windows Clusters
Voters don't need TV commercials, the candidate does because his opponent has them.
Also, if you don't think politicians are a step ahead of a law they passed to 'open' campaign contribution information you are fooling yourself.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
http://www.server-sky.com/
The idea is to launch a lot (zillions) of tiny (grams) solar-powered servers to orbit. This means you have no power of cooling issues. It sounds pretty crazy on the face of it, but if it costs ~$1G to build a data center, it may actually be economical. There are a ton of practical issues, of course - the site goes into them in some detail.
Distributed Computing. They will in fact need a much larger and more powerful datacenter to handle the "distribution" load proposed by B.O.
For $500million I could build a supercomputer AND put a man on the moon. The only data centers that cost more than $1million are the pa-cheese-mo Micro$oft + Oracle + .
Homonym... ho..ho..homonym.
MOAT! IT'S A MOAT! NOT A FUCKING MOTE!
rage off.
I don't know what irritates me more, the fact that the FP used the wrong word or the fact that someone else read it back with the same error thus canceling the mis-meaning.
Here.
So, we need to come up with some changes to the system in order to keep it solvent in 40 years. This is not an emergency. Recent market events have once again illustrated what a terrible idea it is to tie retirement to something as volatile as the stock market.
And, like all of the fiscal nightmare scenarios cooked up lately, it's easily fixed by reducing our military spending. Here are the contracts we awarded just yesterday, which totals $1,250,643,816.00. And that only reports contracts worth less than 5 million dollars.
Seriously I would give my business to the vendors and hardware manufacturers who are committed to America. Force the equipment to be made here, with U.S. labor start to finish and supported by U.S. labor until the contract expires.
You want to get the country back on track, rather than just giving handouts force the change to happen with the money already being spent.
That said, I would ensure it is heavy on virtualization and solid blade servers/chassis. A nod needs to be given to "green-ness" and every effort to create the absolute best all around solution for the money.
I hate when just because something is government numbers like $500MILLION (half a BILLION dollars) is looked at like chicken scratch. It is a lot of money, more than many have to build data centers that do as much of not more. Stop acting like everything in government HAS to cost so damn much and it will!
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Well, since it's government money and a government agency's data center... For starters, it had better be designed from the ground up to provide easy, effortless and unfettered access for all the Federal law enforcement agencies to be able to snoop thru any and all data contained inside it... with impunity, and completely disregarding any confidentiality of any citizen's data.
So true. The biggest hard sell in the world is when ad agencies convince businesses they really need their services because "all your competitors use us!"
I don't have any mod points at the moment, but if I did, I'm not sure if I should mod this "Funny" or "Insightful"...
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
Avocent Data Center Solutions!! (shameless self promoting).
I've bought (3) $3.5M servers for a single project, that didn't include storage ($1.5M) or software ($10M+).
$10M doesn't go as far as you think.
In data centers, you need gas turbine generators, battery banks, redundant power feeds from different substations, cooling, dust suppression, EM measurement, power cable management, network cable management, airflow design, noise design, vibration management, and policies, testing, and procedures to maintain all this stuff.
Then you build the core network for different network zones - keeping your backup areas as far from the internet as possible. Just a few network zones:
- Internet Web
- Internet DB
- Internet Server Management
- Internet Server Backup
- Internal Web/DB
- Internal Management
- Internal Backup
- Protected Web/DB
- Internal Management
- Internal Backup
- RASM Gateways
- Network Management and configuration
As you can see, this gets complicated for an enterprise. If you don't do these, I'd have concerns about your security.
It would have been easier to spot had the poster known the difference between "mote" and "moat". I for one couldn't tell what the poster was on about, because I naively thought "mote" meant "mote".
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I'm not going to say 'go green', but you have the opportunity for fully a redudant virtualized environment. Power, Cooling, and likes...
Get some nice Type 1 Taclanes in there.
O yea, harden the crap out of the systems. Take away their employees' thumb drives like they did mine.
Or around '99. Anyway, one of our jobs was replacing token ring with ethernet! I'm talking replacing the fat cables. Ugh, that was fun. Their closets were horrendous. We had to rewire the phones, too, for some reason I forget now. The server room was completely under-AC'd. (At least they had a raised floor). All kinds of conduit issues, electrical issues (underpowered circuits, non-grounded circuit boxes). The building itself was ok, but would have to be gutted, and I'm not sure if the infrastructure would be able to handle current, modern equipment even then. I know it sounds like a lot of money, but it's probably a better move in the long term. This is purely from an equipment and infrastructure viewpoint that I saw.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Build it and they will come...
With the economy in flux, the staff will move to cheap parts of the US.. even with the wind, cold, and rednecks to deal with.
i like to ask the govt to first assess what they are after. saying hey everybody i have 500million bank account isn't really going to create much competition. it just cost the people more money.
It's not what you build, it is where you build it!
But will it run crysis?
Wow. You are really butt-hurt about not being modded Funny for your anonymously-posted, misspelled, generic joke.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
This is a project they should get right. Social Security's data centers maintain earning and benefits information for nearly every American worker, processing 75 million transactions per day. "All of our plans depend upon a strong, 21st century data center," the agency said in a recent document describing its needs. See Data Center Knowledge for more on this. Regarding the location, the agency says the new facility would need to be within 40 miles of its current location due to "data linkages" - presumably a reference to the ability to perform real-time active-active backup, where distance limitations of storage networking protocols come into play.
One with a really nice rooftop swimming pool!
IT folks should have the good life occasionally. Unfortunately, with most IT shops, you might have to ask Bubba to put the suntan lotion on your back.
What? No blackjack? What kind of bender unit are you?
As this is a government project, for that much money they can buy ten laptops with the required three-button Teflon-ball mice and ergonomic anti-Teflon mousepads.
The same thing they will get from any other contractor.
1) a proposal filled with moving forward market speak, technobabble and vague promises of eventual digital valhalla.
2) cost overrun reports and inflationary figures.
3) bank the additional 500 Million
4) have the project scrapped after 3-5 years.
Yes, don't you hate it when people don't ask google first?
Wind power.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
... on management's competence. I used to work for a company that burned through about $300 million one one IT project. Effectively, it was all lost (I say 'effectively' because the project exists in the form of a couple of servers, just so they don't have to write down 0.3 billion on an annual report and have the BOD see it). Hire these people and $500 million will get the footings poured.
"What? You want the walls and roof? That's gonna cost you more. By the way, that's a nice little Social Security Administration ya' got there, buddy. It'd be a shame if something happened to it (Heh, heh)."
Have gnu, will travel.
Give me the money and I will tell you... from various resorts from around the world how the project is being delayed.
Was it cheaper when they did it all with paper files?
I mean what do you think our government is, a government?
"So, if the government forcibly took $500 million from working families nationwide to spend on unneeded pork project in some Congress-critter's district what would you buy and how would you build it?
There, I fixed that for you.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Hmm, let's think about this shall we?
If DATABASE = DB2 (IBM)
and if IBM offers 'end to end' solution,
then OS = AIX (IBM)
Wouldn't Oracle owning Sun Microsystems have a similar result?
If DATABASE = Oracle (Oracle)
and if Oracle offers 'end to end' solution,
then OS = Solaris (Oracle)
delaying the program, take advantage of Moore's Law.
Then I's spend $100MM on having someone develop better servers that don;t need so much infrastructure (cooling, power, space).
Only then would I start looking for a building.
Nullius in verba
Isn't "homophone" the word you're looking for?
Did anyone mention HP POD, appears to be an off-the-shelf containerised server farm like Google's except that you can buy them - http://www.hp.com/go/pod.
One big shelf, electric and cold water.
I wish to add that one should seriously consider a heat exchanger/AC hybrid system for temperature management rather than pure AC.
You'll save a ton on electricity bills, lower electricity consumption and reduce maintennance and use of refrigerant. It's all very ecologically friendly as well as having the more important bottom-line: Cost savings.
I don't see it mentioned, but if this data center is in a climate that does experience cold seasons, then you automatically have central heating redirecting the data center heat to any neighbouring buildings. If you want to look really long term, you might even look into some sort of heat pump that will create electricity for the building, or to sell back to the utility company.
I wasn't the one who posted it, its just that there was an earlier post who was also modded troll when I thought it was funny. In the mean time, TODAY I have mod points now but I've already commented so I can't mod this comment (or post)
I read enough on the Internet to understand most spelling errors.