Slashdot Mirror
NYC Data Center Needs Focus On Fuel
Nerval's Lobster writes "Who knew that the most critical element of operating a data center in New York City was ensuring a steady supply of diesel fuel? In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the challenges facing data center operators in the affected zones include pumping water from basements, waiting for utility power to be restored, and managing fuel-truck deliveries. And it's become increasingly clear which companies had the resources and foresight to plan for a disaster like Sandy, and which are simply reacting. Here's the latest on providers around the New York area." And remember, having fuel for machines sometimes only means it's time to start the manual labor.
Good luck turning a profit.
How can you not have a multi-day supply of diesel on hand?
Some places did, but in the city, you can't store it above ground - which means that that week's supply of diesel is now mixed in with the ocean.
Which makes me question the wisdom of urban datacenters in the first place.
Everyone already knew that the on-site fuel supply is the limiting factor of power availability in a disaster. Even fuel delivery contracts mean nothing in a disaster or wide-spread outages - hospitals, EMS and other government services will trump the fuel delivery contract, if a hospital needs fuel, they are going to get the fuel that's been "guaranteed" for your datacenter.
There's no reason to spend big $$ creating a flood proof, earthquake proof, tornado proof, airplane crash proof datacenter in the middle of a city when you can have a disaster recovery site 1000 miles away that's not subject to the same type of disaster. (except maybe an asteroid strike, but there are few datacenters on the moon). No matter how disaster-proof you make your datacenter, mother nature (or man) will always find a way to create a disaster you didn't plan for -- even if that "disaster" is a typo in a router configuration file that takes down the network, or a contractor accidentally shorting out the emergency power cutoff switch wiring when bolting a rack to the wall.
Some of these servers were the "cloud".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Think. It is a fire hazard. As in "it starts leaking because of event X happening". And where does stuff go when it leaks? Yes, it goes down.
That is why fuel is stored DOWN in the basement. *Water*, on the other hand, you can store on the roof.
If you don't want to worry about your tank getting flooded, then make it water tight with air inlet well up high out of the water. There are safe and reliable ways of doing this without storing your fuel on the roof!!
I was visiting 1 summer st once, and I asked the guy who set the place up "why don't you use natural gas? You can just get it from your local utilities, or have it delivered by truck." and he looked at me with the "you poor idiot" look people give me some times. Then he said "Nobody uses natural gas because you can't tell if the supply upstream has been disrupted."
I didn't feel like explaining "no, dude, you pump it into a pressurized tank and monitor the flow, *and* you have a diesel generator as a backup / alternate." Do these places typically run with just one generator?
So I ask again -- Why not use natural gas? The pipes are underground and typically pretty safe in a storm.
Lastly -- why the heck did these guys put the pumps *outside* the tank? Why not put them in the tank?
The poor quants. Won't ANYONE think of the poor quants?
The last 15 years have set theoretical physics and mathematics back a generation.
But goddamned if they haven't shrunk the interval of integration on the vig! Truly benefactors of society.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I would have thought it was obvious, but the middle of the city is where the telecommunications infrastructure is. It doesn't exist in a barn a hundred miles from any major city. And fuel has a shelf life. Diesel will slowly oxidize over time, and so the time you can keep it in the tank is about 12 months. You'll burn about 72 gallons an hour per megawatt (as a rough average). So a 2 megawatt data center will need about 3,500 gallons of diesel per day. A gallon takes up 231 cubic inches of space, so a single day's worth of fuel would need a tank with a capacity of 67,375 cubic feet. The average height of a floor in a skyscraper is 12.5 feet. In New York city, the average city block is 264 feet. That means that even if you filled an entire floor of a skyscraper with nothing but diesel fuel, you'd still get less than a week's worth of fuel guys. At a rate of perhaps $100 per month per square foot... you're talking about $83 million a year for a floor of an outlying area just to store that diesel fuel. Mind you, near Wall St., that price is probably going to be double or triple. The price of fuel is peanuts compared to this; 7 days of fuel for a 2MW plant would cost you only $94,000, plus transport costs.
So as you can see, this isn't a question of them not stocking enough fuel -- the cost of storing that fuel is prohibitively expensive.
And that, people, is why they didn't load up on fuel ahead of the storm. You can't simply pay $83 million a year for your data center to protect against a threat that might only materialize once a decade, and be severe enough to deny fuel deliveries or power restoration for that long of a time frame. Generator backup is a short term solution. There is no long term solution for disaster recovery, at least not one that's cost effective. Not in an urban setting.
The only time you can justify spending that kind of cash is if you're supporting critical infrastructure like phones, hospitals, and emergency services. Everyone else plans for a couple day supply and leaves it at that.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Uh... Gulf States? Experience?
First, building an electricity-hungry data center in NYC, with its notorious electricity problems and in the path of coastal storms... well... let's just say it's not the brightest star in the cosmos of ideas.
In fact, it kind of reminds me of... what was it? Oh, yeah. A major Southern coastal city that was built... mostly below sea level! Yeah! That's the ticket!