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Nuke Site Converted Into Green Data Center
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Nov 13, 2008 07:57 AM
from the glowing-data dept.
from the glowing-data dept.
1sockchuck writes "If you had 100,000 servers, would you put them on top of a former nuclear fuel facility? One of the world's largest web hosts, 1&1 Internet, is building a new data center on a site in Hanau, Germany previously used by Siemens to produce mixed oxide rods made from enriched uranium and plutonium. The site has been cleaned up, and 1&1 is converting it into a 'green' data center powered by renewable energy and using free cooling to save on air conditioning costs."
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jeet writes "Data centers are boring and NOCs are doubly so. But this one sure beats all of them. Found this video of a data center suited for james bond villain on Data Center Knowledge website.
The facility is established in a hydrogen bomb safe bunker and has generators used in German submarines. The CEO takes you around and shows some other cool features."
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sssss (Score:4, Funny)
Re:sssss (Score:5, Funny)
There were reasons they moved their UK operations from Staines (Middlesex).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Gag on Siemens?
1&1 (Score:5, Insightful)
1&1? They should worry more about where they site their customer service! I was with them for a while and when they screwed up my billing it took a long, long time to untangle the mess. Mainly because the different departments were all sited in different places and none had the authority to do what needed to be done to sort it out. 1&1 - hateful, money-grubbing company. Thank you, rant over. I will now pay the karma hit with pleasure.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Mainly because the different departments were all sited in different places and none had the authority to do what needed to be done to sort it out.
I always thought this was standard among all customer service departments.
Green power (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Green power, a datacenter here in US too! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Green power (Score:4, Funny)
In the U.S., it means yellow power means 'powered by Mountain Dew'.
Parent
Cleaned up? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oddly enough, TFA says nothing about the site being cleaned up.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well, only one way to find out. Grab your nuclear gear, we're going on vacation!
Re:Cleaned up? (Score:5, Funny)
Oddly enough, TFA says nothing about the site being cleaned up.
This statement seems odd to me. How do you know this?
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Surely! The servers already glow green!
Big deal. Call me when they can do the reverse ... (Score:5, Funny)
... and convert a Green Data Center into a Nuke Site.
THAT would be news.
Re:Big deal. Call me when they can do the reverse (Score:2)
I suppose there are few evil people working on this right now. They probably do not mean data centres only either.
Slashdot effect (Score:3, Funny)
... and convert a Green Data Center into a Nuke Site.
Well do you think a Data Center looks like, once simultaneously hit by slashdot and a bot net ?
This has been done before. Repeatedly.
Re: (Score:2)
We could try to convert it back by slashdotting the data center.
Green Power! (Score:5, Funny)
When they said "Green Power", did they prefix it with "Glowing"?
Nice summary (Score:2)
Does anyone else get the feeling that the summary wants us to react in a certain way?
Would you put your servers on the NUKELEURZ? WOULD YOU!?
I'm not feeling the fear here.
Re: (Score:2)
Does anyone else get the feeling that the summary wants us to react in a certain way? Would you put your servers on the NUKELEURZ? WOULD YOU!?
Yeah...
I wonder if there's more radiation than normal?
Does anybody know if could be bad for the servers, chips etc...
I'm sure they wont die immediately, but I wouldn't be surprised if radiation is bad for todays frail processors...
So what? Why is this a front page story? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a former nuke producing facility.
It's green.
Is there anything to see here?
Re:So what? Why is this a front page story? (Score:5, Funny)
because we beat Digg to it!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I still think an LSD lab [cnn.com] is a better use of a missile silo. God bless William Pickard, and all those who risk their freedom to enrich the lives of so many.
Does it come with a no-Stalagman warranty? (Score:5, Funny)
"Free" Cooling very economical (Score:4, Interesting)
I've read quite a bit about this whole idea of free cooling, and as far as I've been able to conclude, the basic premise is that the replacement cost for failures very much outweighs the costs for cooling it properly.
If you realize that the last decade or so, most components can easilly be overclocked with proper cooling, and will function quite well in a wide range of temperatures, it's not hard to imagine that operating temperatures of anywhere between -10C and +40C are generally fine for most equipment.
The only thing that would be affected, in the sense of less cleaning of air, would be movable parts components, like harddisks, fans, etc.
With the prices on HDDs and the ease of use and availability of any sort of RAID configuration you can think of, the actual costs for replacing these parts when they fail, could very well be a fraction of the costs that would be required to make them function 'properly'.
All in all it seems an economically very viable option, with the added advantage of using a lot less energy overall.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Even if the hard disks were FREE, the cost of replacing them, both in downtime, and in labor, and in higher risk of cascading failures (second drive fails when restoring a raid5, requiring a full restore from backups), are more than the co
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends on your needs. If you have a big company, with tons of servers working in a distributed cluster, then one server can completely fail without having any hit on the performance of the services. And as failures are exceptional cases, those big companies prefer to have failures in some specific components/machines than to have to pay a far higher energy bill.
But if you have the "traditional setup", with tons of machines, each of them responsible for a specific system/application, then of course: if anyt
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever actually looked at the FULL cost of proper cooling? Not just the AC units, but the power draw, the labor to keep the parts running, and filters clean, the HUGE generators to keep these large AC systems running when the power goes out? More than half of most datacenters generators and UPS load is for cooling. You can buy a ton of hard drives for the cost of a 1MW diesel generator.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is slashdot - if you use TANSTAAFL, the grammar nazis will come after you about the double negative. If you don't recognize the Heinlein reference, and can't even google, it's time to turn in your geek card.
Article's a little light on details (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, while the air side economizer is a great idea (and more data centers should be using it), there is no description of what supplemental, mechanical cooling there will be in this facility. I can't honestly believe that there will never be a need for any cooling other than what mother nature is providing. Sure, geographically, it's bound to be cooler than say the southwest U.S. but there are still apt to be days in the summer where temperatures make it implausible to be on "economizer only".
Interference (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Stray residual gamma rays knocks more electrons out of circuit A than circuit B.
2) Resulting potential difference induces current.
3) Resutling current flips a bit.
4) Bit is saved on hard drive.
5) Data is corrupted.
7) ???
8) (Absence of) Profit!
whenever something goes wrong in the server room (Score:5, Interesting)
that is unexplained, i usually say something like "probably a stray cosmic ray"
for the technically inclined, this usually elicits a laugh
for the technically uninclined this usually elicits a stony face of seriousness
try this comment sometime, its win win. its a good litmus test for the level of technical acumen you are dealing with in someone
however, these guys can actually say this sort of thing with a straight face: "probably a stray gamma ray"
Re:whenever something goes wrong in the server roo (Score:2)
Does the old routine of 'hmm' walk over to the right side of the building, look out the window, squinting hard for 15 seconds, and simply saying 'damn sunspots' not work anymore?
Re: (Score:2)
I can remember reading Dave Small (famous hardware hacker and entrepreneur, he made the MacIntosh emulator cartridge on the ATARI ST back in the days, also some 68030 accelerator cards) describing how he saw a character on his screen change in front of his eyes with no intervention, and attributed to a cosmic ray and his higher than normal altitude.
So this begs the question, although modern servers do have ECC memory to correct such occurences, couldn't there be a weaker link in the server chain somewhere t
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, cosmic rays can and do cause errors. Muon flux where I live tends to be roughly one through your hand per second, and they're going a pretty hefty fraction of C. With memory size and transistors scaling further and further down, cosmic ray interference becomes a really big issue, which is why ECC is so important.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel1/16/6912/00278509.pdf?temp=x [ieee.org]
We're dealing with more delicate technology these days; It's only gotten worse since then.
maybe i would take your advice (Score:2)
were you actually some sort of authority, rather than an anonymous coward with an assumed sense of patronizing and condescending authority
I seriously don't understand... (Score:3, Interesting)
One Word: (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Of course you can always go to the North/South pole and you're right, the cooling costs would dramatically decrease. However further you are away from civilization, the bigger are your difficulties to have enough electricity AND data connections (ok, Canada would probably be fine, however the problem remains in principle). This is imho the main drawback of Google's Off-shore Data Center [slashdot.org] and similar proposals.
Save energy... (Score:2)
They can save energy by not having to turn the lights on.
Everything has it's own "natural" glow.
Hot water for the staff won't be a problem either.
Central heating for sysadmins? (Score:3, Funny)
So no need for Ready Brek [wikipedia.org] to make the sysadmins "Get up and Glow"
Hanau (Score:2)
I find it funny (Score:3, Interesting)
I would get this same reaction in my environmental engineering class concerning waste water treatment (gray to white not sewage to gray). Even though the engineering of the treatment plant was explained most of the students would not be willing to drink the water that came out of the facility even though it used RO or other methods that are used to purify water from natural sources. This makes absolutely no sense. Engineers who understand that all water is recycled anyway, and that there is no difference if it is done mechanically vs. naturally.
If as educated individuals we cannot sell ourselves on the safety of the procedures how do we ever expect the uneducated masses to accept them?
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Given a few more years, we could have done some serious irreversible harm
Seeing how ozone is produced by a reaction with UV, the more UV that is allowed to pass the ozone layer causes an increase in natural ozone production. So in essence this becomes a self balancing system (as most of the earth's systems). So the hole would come to a natural equilibrium.
I'm more concerned with the irrational fear associated with such things as the hole in the ozone. You think that it is gone? We have not heard much about it in the last 10 years cause it was of little concern; also, ozo
If it was a nuclear facility... (Score:3, Insightful)
...then it was already green. [blogspot.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Just another massively-over-selling, no-customer-service rock bottom webhost for people who want a brochure site and not much more, as far as I can see. Nothing special about them...
Re:One of the world's largest webhosts? (Score:4, Informative)
They're mainly European and if my previous history with them is anything to go by, they're a fly-by-night, domains-and-hosting-for-£1 outfit that has little or no technical acumen and is mainly for small business or mass-domain sales direct to personal customers.
I once had a dedicated "root" Linux server with them which I never got working for its intended purpose because their initial setup was dire (outdated Plesk, kernel, Apache, etc. all with serious remotely-exploitable security flaws), their support was atrocious (wouldn't even know what Apache was half the time and their answer to everything was "you have a dedicated server, you do it" unless you were asking them to reboot and even then you had to fight). Which wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for the fact that the supplied server came with insecure software by default (and I'm talking about several-year-old flaws) and the only available updates (specially hosted on their privately-accesible servers only to dedicated customers, including updates to the pay-for software and part of the support contract) for their customised-kernel/userspace/Plesk etc. specifically said not to install them AT ALL without actual physical access (one specifically mentioned "DO NOT DO THIS VIA SSH", which was the only access I had).
Their dedicated server support line couldn't understand the problem, wanted me to just run it anyway (they charged for rebuilds), refused to do anything more than reboot if it went wrong (and the nature of the update specified that if it went wrong, a simple reboot would do NOTHING because it updated so much stuff), refused to supply a server with a newer image or to upgrade it, and sometimes couldn't even understand simple technical terms. So I had a choice - run a high-power, high-bandwidth, Internet-facing server with well-known, long-established serious security flaws in all the important software (and suffer their charges if the server was compromised and started spewing spam), or attempt a massive upgrade party with hundreds of updates remotely via SSH where several of them specifically state not to do it remotely (and get charged if it needs to be restored from their backup, even if just to a bootable state so that I could restore *my* backups).
Needless to say, I chose the third option: tell them to stick it where the sun don't shine. Letters of complaint to head office went unanswered or (if sent recorded delivery) received the vaguest of replies which basically said "We don't care, we can do no wrong, you still owe us money even though you couldn't use the server, because you're a 'dedicated server' customer we won't do anything to help you, ever.", etc. I even have a soundbite on a phone call to the support line where the chief technical bod on the special "dedicated server support line" actually refuses to state what it is that they COULD do for me. "Can you reboot my server if I ask?" "Can you restore from backup?" "Can you shut the machine down?" "Can you filter a DDoS attack if I get hit?" "What questions do you ACTUALLY answer?"... every single answer was the same... "I can't tell you that, sir". I mean, seriously, what the hell kind of answer is that?
Needless to say, I never used them ever again and like to pull out the story whenever I hear their name.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Seconded, same expirience here, in germany.
Apparently the business model of selling crappy products without any support is kinda successful all around the world...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've used them as Schuland Partner AG when I was working in Germany, although the accounts were on Solaris at the time with few problems and hosted a number of personal sites on their shared hosting up until 2004 or 2005. My old comapny had a dedicated server with them and had a few problems. On paper they had (and still do) have the best price on dedicated server hosting when you compare between companies. But if anything goes wrong, you're screwed. We had a hard disk fail and tried to get it replaced.
Radioactivity 101 (Score:4, Interesting)
I recall that back in the old days when expensive ICs were packaged in ceramic and cheap ones in plastic, cheap memory was less prone to bit errors because some of the ceramics contained, as it turned out, significant amounts of radioactivity. Potassium, for instance, is noticeably radioactive in its natural state (one of its isotopes is unstable).
Given that the concrete won't be made from raw materials collected on site, nor will the aluminum and steel in the server racks, and that the only really common beta emitter (tritium) produces electrons with less energy than those in an old style CRT, your fears are groundless.
Parent