title: Good reason to have onsite admins! link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/11/18/good-reason-to-have-onsite-admins/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 607 created: 2007/11/18 13:31:26 created_gmt: 2007/11/18 13:31:26 comment_status: open post_name: good-reason-to-have-onsite-admins status: publish post_type: post

Good reason to have onsite admins!

There’s an article up on Slash , Sun to Create Underground Japanese Datacenter. From the article:

Kurtz’sKompund writes with word of a Sun project in Japan, one that’s taking a somewhat non-standard approach to data center construction. To save on power, heating, and water costs, the consortium is going to be building their center in an abandoned coal mine. The outpost will be created by lowering Blackbox systems into the ground; estimates on savings run to $9 million annually in electricity alone.

The obvious (well, at least to the moderately intelligent people who tend to visit Slashdot) criticism of this “approach” showed up in the comments very quickly. This thread pretty much said it all:

Are they crush proof? (Score:5, Insightful)
by rueger (210566) on Saturday November 17, @06:55PM (#21393535)
(http://www.threesquirrels.com/)
The Blackbox containers are robust enough to withstand earthquakes, being capable of withstanding a quake of magnitude 6.7 on the Richter scale.

I don’t know, but placing servers 100m underground in a place that routinely is hit by large earthquakes seems a dubious idea. The containers themselves may survive a quake, but what happens when the disused coal mine collapses onto and around them? Even if the containers and servers survive, will the power and data cables? If the tunnels collapse how will you get to and from the servers for maintenance?
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Re:Are they crush proof? (Score:5, Funny)
by darthflo (1095225) on Saturday November 17, @07:20PM (#21393675)
Two possible outcomes:
1: Mine collapses, buries everything under millions of tons of rocks and stuff, Blackboxes and cabling survives, Sun market’s “the world’s most secure datacenter”.
2: Mine collapses, buries everything under millions of tons of rocks and stuff, Blackboxes and/or cabling gets scratched and/or really damaged, Sun hires Godzilla (this is Japan, where Godzilla’s big in, remember?) to smash away them rocks and free the mine once again.

Re: (Score:2)
by Dunbal (464142)
Not to mention the fact that coal dust is extremely explosive. I wouldn’t like to see a few sparks in there after a major quake. But then again I guess they know what they are doing.
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Re:Are they crush proof? (Score:5, Funny)
by couchslug (175151) on Saturday November 17, @08:01PM (#21393945)
“If the tunnels collapse how will you get to and from the servers for maintenance?”

Good reason to have onsite admins!

So go ahead. Outsource your data center to Sun!

Of course there are more than a few data centers for hire sited in places like Orlando and Houston, which have had a couple of close brushes with natural disaster themselves the last few years. It’s a difficult trade off, being close to the beach you love, or the oil billionaires you need to suck up to. Guess the cost of real estate in places like Montana and North Dakota is a little too steep.

For another really stupid idea, see this old post from Ranum.

The only thing that dampens the humor of it is that since 2004 (when it was first published) an awful lot of companies have (possibly irreversibly) piled most of their technology eggs in the India offshore basket (decimating the ranks of U.S. tech workers in the process).

Remember the riots last Spring in Bangalore? Here’s a headline didn’t make it into the mainstream media:

Calif. IT honchos were marooned in their hotel rooms’ during riots

which is a verbatim a reprint of a story in The Bangalore Blog entitled Silicon Volcano. here’s a snippet:

Rarely do seven days pass, without a head honcho of an international technology company or two, passing through Bangalore

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