It can easily be argued that (general) education and economic development can lead to a decrease in HIV in the long term. Helping people live mildly better lives in the short term won't improve long term opportunity.
I lived on an island for several years. While its source of revenue was mainly tourism, businesses could not operate reliably when you had to try and go up the mountain to use one of the old analog brick telephones to contact the mainland. When land lines came to the island, a whole new range of possibilities opened up. While I hated the idea of cell phones coming, their arrival made it much easier to operate a business still. And, when ADSL finally came, you could attract people with more money.
This change has helped enrich the people of the island (at least financially), and has improved education and healthcare over a 20 year period. It might still be reliant on tourism for business (I don't think the shoes named after it are made there), but internet access clearly brought opportunities for the people.
The Rittal racks just have a coil in them; the servers are cooled with air.
On a power basis, there isn't much of an efficiency improvement. Your biggest gain is if you take the filters out since the cabinet is sealed.
As for a leak hitting the computers, the coil is in a sidecar which is designed pretty well to segregate leaks. Biggest concern is usually what happens when you lose water or fans. Most of the cabinets open the doors automatically.
Long distance links only make sense today between major population centers with good public transit connections. If you must drive to the train, it will never be commercially viable, unless it is faster than driving.
In Europe or China, those cities are well connected at the endooints.
In the US, only two of the top three metro areas have functional transit systems. The only way to make it work here is to invest both in local and long distance rail, and hope things come together when it is finished in 5-10 years. That takes a lot of money and a lot of power.
Upside of using electronic transfers is that they are very traceable, you can always find out to whom an unauthorised transfer was made
Actually, in the US, it would be very easy to automatically shift money through several accounts with the same technique. Anybody in the chain that doesn't check the transactions gets left holding the bag.
It is pretty scary how easy it has become now. There needs to be some significant reform in this area.
The auto correction software is half the problem on the iPhone. It is as though it was only ever intended to be used to type URLs and search strings. Something as long as this post is painful to type on the iPhone.
I still curse them for not having the bluetooth keyboard profile. Asenine.
Pretend you could put this equipment in a concrete vault. If the box is a 5' cube above ground, you are looking at a minimum of a 10' x 8' x 8' excavation to build a vault and bury it. It will need a 6' x 6' access hatch for future equipment replacement.
Underground utilities are hard work. Finding that big of a space clear in many areas is a huge challenge; the planning effort alone is easily doubled, and the installation cost is at least 10x. On top of all that, the operating cost is at least 50% higher. All this with no benefit to the utility. The question then becomes can the service be provided at a price point that it will have a return on investment?
Designing more compact boxes is great... but if it means you have to piss off 20x more people, what is the better solution?
Any monoculture has huge risks. If you want to improve reliability, you provide diverse, (at least partially) redundant systems and DR plans as to what you do if systems go down.
Maybe a better argument is for company-level control of user information rather than just user-level backups. If an employee deletes all of their e-mail, the company can't comply with document retention requirements. Likewise, deleting a user eliminates all of their data with no backup recourse.
For e-mail, I imagine what you have to do is migrate service from gmail to positini (google subsidiary) to get the added functionality.
I live in Los Angeles and bike to work every day. Yes, there are bad days, but it is safe enough if you are smart about time, route, and habits. You also need to be within a reasonable distance for cycling.
It is possible almost anywhere. Obviously you try to avoid the biggest roads wherever you can; dealing with freeways, train tracks, subway grates, and road rage can be problems...
I'm a quota story. I thought it was a little stupid at the time, but I wanted to be an Architect. But the school needed to be 1/3 Architectural Engineers and 2/3 Architects by admissions. My math SATs were too high, so to fill the Architectural Engineering quotas, they shifted me over to engineering.
Now I am a happy engineer. I never would have been a happy Architect. Some quotas help recreate a balance where it would not exist naturally.
My university had a 41% graduation rate for engineering majors. Engineering is hard; people are lazy. You have to have a passion for the subject to a) put up with it and b) excel at it.
From what the Endowment Association tells me, most people give up on the math. The solution seems to be to improve math education in secondary school.
After that, it comes down to money. Subsidize the freaking engineering and science programs!
Quotas aren't a bad thing, but when you are pressed to find viable candidates in the first place it might not be the best first step.
You should be able to do better with east-west distribution of wind power rather than north-south. Promote offshore wind power instead... it is closer to concentration of utilization as well, which improves the efficiency.
How exactly do you propose to build a significant number of nuke plants in the course of the next 60 months? Do you understand the effort involved, even if you minimize regulatory oversight? Do you understand the risks that such accelerated timelines could do to the safety of such plants?
All investments in energy efficiency have to have a measurable payback. A more efficient chiller system will cost about 50% more than the most basic system, and pay back over 5-6 years.
But, that basic system can be re-started in under 3 minutes while the advanced system requires 15 minutes. The basic system can be repaired by anybody, but the advanced system requires a specialized technician.
Suddenly, in order to meet reliability objectives, the data center operator must buy both systems, at a 150% premium and no payback.
There are organizations that help share information among competitors (like 7x24 Exchange). Having the EPA jump into the mess helps to fast-track a lot of the changes (even when they don't always have the best ideas).
The Energy Star program needs to establish a program for computer power supplies hands-down, and regulate it. That is the only way to make things work, and it isn't that hard.
As for Energy Star buildings (and speaking as an Energy Star Partner on that one), there might not be direct regulation by the EPA from that, but it did help the push for state energy efficiency codes.
The problem with making emergy efficiency benchmarks for Data Centers is that it is very difficult to provide prescriptive guidelines as you can for a general purpose building (so many watts/square foot for this, so many BTUs for that). You are then forced into making performance criteria that are difficult (if possible at all) to establish in the design phase of the building.
And of course the biggest hurdle-- in most cases efficiency runs counter to reliability. Sure, you can bump your data center temperature up to 80 (in the cold aisles)-- the equipment is rated for it. Of course, if you lose cooling for five seconds everything will overheat.
I would love to see data centers drop to 27% parasitic losses (including cooling). Unfortunately, too many of the investments have 6-10 year paybacks which makes them not commercially viable. Actually quantifying the performance is also nearly impossible-- software like E-Quest are a miserable attempt for much simpler buildings.
I liked my TeraStation too, until Day 366 when the thing crapped out on me. The web interface was awful, the backups unreliable, and the lack of a physical "graceful shutdown" type of button gave the whole system extra stress.
That shit little box ended up costing us about 20x its purchase price. Much happier with a proper server, although reduced power consumption would be nice.
As much as I bagged on the TeraStation in my last post, there is a time and a place for a NAS box. The key is to realize when that time is over.
For my small business, it was what we needed our first 6 months. Once we hit a certain level though, it was time to migrate to a proper solution. We delayed that transition six months and it cost us. If we had tried to put the NAS back in service, it would have cost us our business a few months later.
Is it too much to ask to get rid of the freaking "power xxx homes" nonsense and put things in terms of MW or MWh?!
This is supposed to be news for nerds, not news for soccer moms whose only perspective on life and electricity is their own home! (Small subset of soccer moms, that is.)
Actually, you could argue that the unhealthy people cost less in total care, since they don't live as long. Much cheaper for someone to die at 60 in a day from a stroke because of a lifetime of unhealthy choices than to die at 85 after weeks in ICU.
All companies face those same challenges, including Microsoft and Google. I work mostly with banks, and we are always faced with micro and macro change and growth planning. With help, some banks can go from a one-quarter projection to a reasonable three year projection. Five to six years is harder, but sometimes possible.
The biggest secret is in providing enough space to allow for growth, changing needs, and eventually equipment replacement.
As for efficiency, I have to tell an aspiring co-lo that they will pay more for power than their OC-192s, and thatthe cost of a server is less than the power it consumes. It is easy for growing companies to ignore it at first, but it eventually catches up with you.
The old solution was to move the servers to a place with cheap electricity. That will backfire soon; you really need to shift focus to plan for energy efficiency, even if it means your fiber runs are longer (segregate by density rather than system or function).
There has been a shortage of architectural engineers for the past two decades. I say architectural engineers because very few mechanical engineers go into HVAC, and very few electrical engineers do power systems. It doesn't seem quite as bad structurally.
It us a shame because it really has a lot of great career opportunities.
Data center work is just a subset of that-- it is hard to find people with the experience, but not impossible to train.
Slashdot Mirror
It can easily be argued that (general) education and economic development can lead to a decrease in HIV in the long term. Helping people live mildly better lives in the short term won't improve long term opportunity.
I lived on an island for several years. While its source of revenue was mainly tourism, businesses could not operate reliably when you had to try and go up the mountain to use one of the old analog brick telephones to contact the mainland. When land lines came to the island, a whole new range of possibilities opened up. While I hated the idea of cell phones coming, their arrival made it much easier to operate a business still. And, when ADSL finally came, you could attract people with more money.
This change has helped enrich the people of the island (at least financially), and has improved education and healthcare over a 20 year period. It might still be reliant on tourism for business (I don't think the shoes named after it are made there), but internet access clearly brought opportunities for the people.
The Rittal racks just have a coil in them; the servers are cooled with air.
On a power basis, there isn't much of an efficiency improvement. Your biggest gain is if you take the filters out since the cabinet is sealed.
As for a leak hitting the computers, the coil is in a sidecar which is designed pretty well to segregate leaks. Biggest concern is usually what happens when you lose water or fans. Most of the cabinets open the doors automatically.
What a tirade!
Long distance links only make sense today between major population centers with good public transit connections. If you must drive to the train, it will never be commercially viable, unless it is faster than driving.
In Europe or China, those cities are well connected at the endooints.
In the US, only two of the top three metro areas have functional transit systems. The only way to make it work here is to invest both in local and long distance rail, and hope things come together when it is finished in 5-10 years. That takes a lot of money and a lot of power.
Actually, in the US, it would be very easy to automatically shift money through several accounts with the same technique. Anybody in the chain that doesn't check the transactions gets left holding the bag.
It is pretty scary how easy it has become now. There needs to be some significant reform in this area.
The auto correction software is half the problem on the iPhone. It is as though it was only ever intended to be used to type URLs and search strings. Something as long as this post is painful to type on the iPhone.
I still curse them for not having the bluetooth keyboard profile. Asenine.
Pretend you could put this equipment in a concrete vault. If the box is a 5' cube above ground, you are looking at a minimum of a 10' x 8' x 8' excavation to build a vault and bury it. It will need a 6' x 6' access hatch for future equipment replacement.
Underground utilities are hard work. Finding that big of a space clear in many areas is a huge challenge; the planning effort alone is easily doubled, and the installation cost is at least 10x. On top of all that, the operating cost is at least 50% higher. All this with no benefit to the utility. The question then becomes can the service be provided at a price point that it will have a return on investment?
Designing more compact boxes is great... but if it means you have to piss off 20x more people, what is the better solution?
Any monoculture has huge risks. If you want to improve reliability, you provide diverse, (at least partially) redundant systems and DR plans as to what you do if systems go down.
A DR solution isn't "someone else's problem."
I thought WashU was actually doing this type of thing in the early 90's as well for distance surgery applications over low-speed data links.
Maybe a better argument is for company-level control of user information rather than just user-level backups. If an employee deletes all of their e-mail, the company can't comply with document retention requirements. Likewise, deleting a user eliminates all of their data with no backup recourse.
For e-mail, I imagine what you have to do is migrate service from gmail to positini (google subsidiary) to get the added functionality.
And, if you really want to be inside, try coding on this...
I live in Los Angeles and bike to work every day. Yes, there are bad days, but it is safe enough if you are smart about time, route, and habits. You also need to be within a reasonable distance for cycling.
It is possible almost anywhere. Obviously you try to avoid the biggest roads wherever you can; dealing with freeways, train tracks, subway grates, and road rage can be problems...
Great points, but the best solution is a mix of technologies-- my preference is a DC flywheel in parallel with batteries on a double-conversion UPS.
I'm a quota story. I thought it was a little stupid at the time, but I wanted to be an Architect. But the school needed to be 1/3 Architectural Engineers and 2/3 Architects by admissions. My math SATs were too high, so to fill the Architectural Engineering quotas, they shifted me over to engineering.
Now I am a happy engineer. I never would have been a happy Architect. Some quotas help recreate a balance where it would not exist naturally.
My university had a 41% graduation rate for engineering majors. Engineering is hard; people are lazy. You have to have a passion for the subject to a) put up with it and b) excel at it.
From what the Endowment Association tells me, most people give up on the math. The solution seems to be to improve math education in secondary school.
After that, it comes down to money. Subsidize the freaking engineering and science programs!
Quotas aren't a bad thing, but when you are pressed to find viable candidates in the first place it might not be the best first step.
You should be able to do better with east-west distribution of wind power rather than north-south. Promote offshore wind power instead... it is closer to concentration of utilization as well, which improves the efficiency.
How exactly do you propose to build a significant number of nuke plants in the course of the next 60 months? Do you understand the effort involved, even if you minimize regulatory oversight? Do you understand the risks that such accelerated timelines could do to the safety of such plants?
All investments in energy efficiency have to have a measurable payback. A more efficient chiller system will cost about 50% more than the most basic system, and pay back over 5-6 years.
But, that basic system can be re-started in under 3 minutes while the advanced system requires 15 minutes. The basic system can be repaired by anybody, but the advanced system requires a specialized technician.
Suddenly, in order to meet reliability objectives, the data center operator must buy both systems, at a 150% premium and no payback.
There are organizations that help share information among competitors (like 7x24 Exchange). Having the EPA jump into the mess helps to fast-track a lot of the changes (even when they don't always have the best ideas).
The Energy Star program needs to establish a program for computer power supplies hands-down, and regulate it. That is the only way to make things work, and it isn't that hard.
As for Energy Star buildings (and speaking as an Energy Star Partner on that one), there might not be direct regulation by the EPA from that, but it did help the push for state energy efficiency codes.
The problem with making emergy efficiency benchmarks for Data Centers is that it is very difficult to provide prescriptive guidelines as you can for a general purpose building (so many watts/square foot for this, so many BTUs for that). You are then forced into making performance criteria that are difficult (if possible at all) to establish in the design phase of the building.
And of course the biggest hurdle-- in most cases efficiency runs counter to reliability. Sure, you can bump your data center temperature up to 80 (in the cold aisles)-- the equipment is rated for it. Of course, if you lose cooling for five seconds everything will overheat.
I would love to see data centers drop to 27% parasitic losses (including cooling). Unfortunately, too many of the investments have 6-10 year paybacks which makes them not commercially viable. Actually quantifying the performance is also nearly impossible-- software like E-Quest are a miserable attempt for much simpler buildings.
I liked my TeraStation too, until Day 366 when the thing crapped out on me. The web interface was awful, the backups unreliable, and the lack of a physical "graceful shutdown" type of button gave the whole system extra stress.
That shit little box ended up costing us about 20x its purchase price. Much happier with a proper server, although reduced power consumption would be nice.
As much as I bagged on the TeraStation in my last post, there is a time and a place for a NAS box. The key is to realize when that time is over.
For my small business, it was what we needed our first 6 months. Once we hit a certain level though, it was time to migrate to a proper solution. We delayed that transition six months and it cost us. If we had tried to put the NAS back in service, it would have cost us our business a few months later.
All telephone signals require GPS for timing-- it's the T in TDMA. Every central office, every POP, every HUB site all have GPS.
Is it too much to ask to get rid of the freaking "power xxx homes" nonsense and put things in terms of MW or MWh?!
This is supposed to be news for nerds, not news for soccer moms whose only perspective on life and electricity is their own home! (Small subset of soccer moms, that is.)
Actually, you could argue that the unhealthy people cost less in total care, since they don't live as long. Much cheaper for someone to die at 60 in a day from a stroke because of a lifetime of unhealthy choices than to die at 85 after weeks in ICU.
All companies face those same challenges, including Microsoft and Google. I work mostly with banks, and we are always faced with micro and macro change and growth planning. With help, some banks can go from a one-quarter projection to a reasonable three year projection. Five to six years is harder, but sometimes possible.
The biggest secret is in providing enough space to allow for growth, changing needs, and eventually equipment replacement.
As for efficiency, I have to tell an aspiring co-lo that they will pay more for power than their OC-192s, and thatthe cost of a server is less than the power it consumes. It is easy for growing companies to ignore it at first, but it eventually catches up with you.
The old solution was to move the servers to a place with cheap electricity. That will backfire soon; you really need to shift focus to plan for energy efficiency, even if it means your fiber runs are longer (segregate by density rather than system or function).
There has been a shortage of architectural engineers for the past two decades. I say architectural engineers because very few mechanical engineers go into HVAC, and very few electrical engineers do power systems. It doesn't seem quite as bad structurally.
It us a shame because it really has a lot of great career opportunities.
Data center work is just a subset of that-- it is hard to find people with the experience, but not impossible to train.