Wednesday, February 13, 2013

The Archdruid is right, one of the first things to go....

The company had been packing a 40-by-60-foot rental space here with racks of computer servers that were needed to store and process information from members’ accounts. The electricity pouring into the computers was overheating Ethernet sockets and other crucial components.

Thinking fast, Mr. Rothschild, the company’s engineering chief, took some employees on an expedition to buy every fan they could find — “We cleaned out all of the Walgreens in the area,” he said — to blast cool air at the equipment and prevent the Web site from going down...



Source.

1 comment:

  1. nah, it isn't so..., with massive virtualization now normative, i.e., a single outsize server chassis supporting many thousands of virtual machines, liquid chillers that direct the coolth specifically and exclusively to the server chassis themselves, advanced new storage area technologies, and finally, software based switching just around the corner - the efficiency of the petabyte data centers will make today's data center operations seem like unsustainable hogs, much as today's data centers make the data centers of 25 years ago seem like unsustainable hogs by comparison.

    This cloud stuff is no joke. The levels of consolidation and intensive capital investment involved with building and maintaining state of the art and highly efficient data center infrastructures guarantees that there will only be a handful of cloud operators a decade hence.

    Think Google, Amazon, (facebook may or may not be a player), (Windows is so inherently inefficient and Microsoft has been so needlessly thuggish, that it won't be a player), then the feds have been doing amazing things for a minute or two at their major civilian and of course military installations like the new NSA jawnt in Utah.

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