Building a Data Center In 60 Days 117
miller60 writes "The facilities team at Australia's Pipe Networks is down to the wire in its bid to complete a data center in 60 days. And in an era when many major data-center projects are shrouded in secrecy, these guys are putting the entire effort online, with daily updates and photos on the company blog, a live webcam inside the facility, a countdown timer, and a punch-list of key tasks left to finish. Their goal is to complete the job by Friday morning eastern US time."
Re:What's burning? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Datacenter???? (Score:3, Informative)
When I first started using colocation back around 96, Exodus's colo room was 6 racks. They had explosive growth and by 2001 had massive datacenters in several cities around the globe. Anyway, give them time. If they do things right, they will grow.
Re:Datacenter???? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Trunk delivery timeframe (Score:5, Informative)
(Note the Optus cable network provided , and was designed to fixed line telephones from the start, which makes up the small percentage of non-Telstra fixed-line infrastuture around.)
However, Telstra, as a monopoly, MUST provide wholesale access to the fixed-line infrastructure, as such most Australians are actually with internet providers who wholesale off Telstra, either over Telstra DSLAM's or their own. The wholesale prices of which have been ENFORCED even DICTATED by the Australian competition authorities, who among other things, refuse to tolerate American crap such as "up to XXX mbps" (Australian consumers, unlike American's, demand full line speed, no lousy contention or else), "unlimited... up to XXX GB" etc.
A federal election issue this year is an FTTN (fibre-to-the-node) rollout to every single location within these captial cities, and an assortment of regional centers. Two proposals are in play - one from Telstra, who set wholesale prices up high because they don't want to share, and their shareholders (investment funds, small % of mon'n'dad investors) who want returns, and the "G9" - favored by many, but the pricing still sucks.
As the majority of Australian internet traffic is to/through the US, Australian bandwidth pricing is dictated by capacity on submarine cables to the US - of which there is only one - running out of "spare" capacity fast*, despite only being turned on a decade ago. Some providers lease additional capacity via Japan, and there are three new submarine cables under planning that are attempting to remedy the bandwidth shortage, either by going to Guam to patch into Japanese capacity, or only up to Hawaii. As I've said, unlike American's, Australian users, after suffering a few years of low broadband speeds, don't tolerate US style bandwidth overselling (those that have tried failed miserably), and as such a lot of ISPs, outside Telstra (who charge almost business rates anyway), we're forced to raise prices due to the increasing use of bittorrent etc.
* even worse the operators of the cable in question, Southern-Cross cable, aren't in a particular hurry to upgrade either.
Re:Sun has your covered there (Score:5, Informative)
Inside the building, they had a bunch of photoshopped pictures of these black boxes in various locations like on top of an offshore oil rig, stacked 3 high in a warehouse, and sitting on top of a skyscraper. The photoshopping was fairly good, but you could tell the photos were faked, mostly because at the time only 2 black boxes had actually been built, and one of them was outside in the parking lot.
Re:Datacenter???? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Datacenter???? (Score:3, Informative)
You have lost all credibility to determine what a datacenter is. A 150KVA UPS would service about 50 moderately loaded (about half empty) racks with most current equipment. 170 racks could power many midsized companies, my employer's an S&P 500 company and we have 11 racks moderately full. Wikipedia defines a datacenter as:
A data center is a facility used for housing a large amount of electronic equipment, typically computers and communications equipment. As the name implies, a data center is usually maintained by an organization for the purpose of handling the data necessary for its operations
Which I would say 170 racks could definitely qualify as.
More details (Score:2, Informative)
The story also says the 60-day period is just the construction time period, and not the planning behind it, etc. But whatever. They created some hype and it worked. It worked too well, apparently.