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Databases In Caves? A Unique Google Fiber Bid
An anonymous reader writes "Plenty of cities have submitted bids for the Google Fiber project, with most of their bids being centered around the attributes that could describe many communities. Yet one small midwestern town, with much less fanfare than the metropolitan bids, provided an unusual proposition for Google in their likely quixotic nomination. Quincy, IL, has an extensive series of underground caverns that could provide year-round temperature control, dedicated hydroelectric power, and security in the case of a terrorist attack."
Sys admins pretty much live in caves already, right?
Big former limestone quarry with a bunch of underground storage. Town has its own electric utility too.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
We may not have extensive, cool underground caves, but we do have a nearly unlimited resource of young college-aged girls in warm sunny California weather right on the beach with an advanced technical university that can turn out underpaid interns by the droves. So suck it Quincy. =P
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I don't know if they will be google fiber finalist, but they make a very compelling argument for being a data center. Kudos for using the competition as a backdoor into media spotlight.
..and my down may not have extensive, cool, secure areas for servers, but we need it as badly as anyone I've ever heard of. I'm paying $110 a month for 1mbps SDSL.
Whale
1. they are hard to get to
2. they are hard to get supplies to and build in
3. they flood
4. they have air quality issues
5. and they ARE cool... until you put a bunch of servers in them, and then they heat up, and STAY hot, and are harder to cool than on the surface
the idea of servers in caves sucks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is a great idea provided the area is geologically stable and there is little risk of flooding.
Dispersing data centers over wide geographical areas is also advisable.
Because when I think Quincy IL, I think TERRORIST ATTACK.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I wonder if some of the northern cities/towns in Canada which has the infrastructure/connectivity may give them edge on cooling cost? There are technologies out there that can utilize external temperature.
How quake proof are those caves? Because that is the most visible concern about anything this year in particular (even if is within average, it got a lot of visibility)..
A caveAdmin could do it!
Actually, it's not a bad idea... Quincy, IL has three decent colleges nearby and a huge local technical population: two of the largest radio, television, and satellite transmitter manufacturers, Harris and Broadcast Electronics, are based in Quincy.
This would probably work out well if it wasn't for the hordes of man eating rats and re-animated skeletons that inhabit these caves.
But I guess it would be pretty good security as long as the terrorists didn't happen to bring +1 war hammers and town portal scrolls along...
I've worked in the Kansas City caves and sat behind a desk on a computer for a while. It's fascinating for the first day but that ends quickly. The lack of sunlight and outdoor exposure really gets to drain on you week after week. Imagine getting up and going outside for some fresh air but when you go outside it's very dark, humid, claustrophobic, and the air is stale. It drives you nuts. Especially when you hear creaks and cracks all day in the dead of silence. I would not want to be an IT admin working in a cave.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Or much eariler, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), where the giant computer EPICAC XIV resided in Carlsbad Caverns. I guess Google's servers won't require an army of workers to swap out vacuum tubes though.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
What a dark, unpleasant place. Getting into the caves isn't so hard, because Quincy is situated on high bluffs overlooking the Mississippi. So access is probably pretty much straight in from the highway or something like it. Keeping the Mississippi out the next time it floods in a major way may be a bigger problem. Being in Quincy though... that's the biggest problem. The darkest two years of my life were my time there, trying to find something to do, trying to stay warm in my cavernous old house. Quincy is 100 miles from anywhere, and once you get anywhere you still have a couple hundred miles to get to anywhere you'd actually want to be.
http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/c/capcave.htm
Google Fiber is about connecting homes and businesses to the Internet.
Not databases.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
all supervillain cave headquarters have a rocket launchpad room
all evil supervillains in b grade hollywood movies want to launch rockets at somebody from hidden rocket launch sites. whether syndrome in the incredibles, blofeld in you only live twice, rogue russians in vin diesel's xxx, whomever
to cool down their ridiculously huge server complex then is a simple matter of opening the dome over the launch pad
duh!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They are good at hiding stuff like bin laden
This sounds like Plato's version of a server farm.
As opposed to those sorts of caverns that are above-ground?
Or are you going to hire them as network engineers? They seem to have a lot in common... fear of sunlight, refusal to shave, grumpiness...
Dude. I live in Northwestern Illinois and I would gladly move to Quincy, IL to do admin stuff in a giant cave. :-)
Besides the obviousness of not having to seriously travel for support Quincy has fairly inexpensive real estate with actual space around it.
Now to figure out how to deal with being upside-down on that pesky mortgage....
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Tony Stark built a database in a CAVE! With a BOX OF SCRAPS!
Tony Stark built a database in a CAVE! With a BOX OF SCRAPS!
First thing I thought of, too.
I forgot about Player Piano, though I think there was a super-computer-in-a-cave in Breakfast of Champions, too.
Slashdot is not a game, Slashdot is not a game. Crap, I just lost points.
provide year-round temperature control, dedicated hydroelectric power, and security in the case of a terrorist attack."
I'd welcome you. I live in Quincy, and I can tell you that much of the underground caverns mentioned are huge chambers of a gypsum mine. The chambers that have been fully mined are run by a company called Underground Warehouses which is a division of the processed mineral products company (Huber) that runs the mine.
These chambers are big enough that years ago when I briefly worked as a temp, we were parking inside them and the semis that made pickups and deliveries pulled up to docks inside them.
Quincy's working on getting gravity-propelled hydroelectric turbines installed on two of the lock and dam installations on the Mississippi.
The city's on top of the bluffs, and no more than a few blocks and some outlying areas were flooded in 1993, 1997, or 2008. Some roads into and out of town close in major floods, though, and alternate routes need to be found. The mines are along one of the routes that closes from one end for a few weeks once every few years.
It's also a fairly well-to-do town for its size. At about 45,000 people, it's not huge, but it is the biggest town in any direction for about 100 miles. It's on a spur of interstate highway, it has rail access, an airport with daily flights to St. Louis, a public bus system, taxi service, and a point-to-point van service. A few fairly major companies are located in town, too: Titan International (the largest off-road tire and wheel manufacturer in the US), Knapheide (makes of utility beds for trucks), Harris Broadcasting (makers of digital and analog broadcasting equipment for TV and radio stations), Hollister-Whitney (one of the few makers of the working parts pf elevators, although the installing company is usually the name you see on the inside of the carriage), and a large facility for Gardner Denver (makers of air pumps, compressors, and blowers). I'm sure they'd love some high-speed fiber goodness as much as the residential customers.
Now, I'm not the submitter of the original story. I just happen to live in Quincy right now and would love for Google to come in and upset the AT&T/Comcast apple cart.
Just outside a town within commuting distance of Quincy, IL, a Hannibal, MO area hog farm has been harnessed as a possible source of crude oil replacement.
They're testing processed hog excrement as a heavy crude replacement for asphalt. The actual test is in Eureka, MO, a St. Louis-area community home to Six Flags St. Louis.
Well, not "caves" per se, but we do have the Springfield Underground, an extensive system of underground limestone quarries, the mined-out parts of which have been converted into office, data hosting, warehousing, and manufacturing space. (Here's a video tour.)
I've been in it. It's pretty impressive.
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