Building a Data Center In 60 Days

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."

why?

[thedrunkensailor]

Why not forget the deadline and get it right? TFA says this was an exec's idea....go figure

Re:why?

[Aladrin]

Why not? It's a challenge, not a true 'deadline'. Think of it as an episode of 'Monster House' where they get to keep the tools if they get the nearly-impossible project done on time. There's -always- work to be done afterwards to finish it off, but the work is complete as far as they were contracted.

It's not 'have a fully functional data center filled with customers.' It's only 'build it.'

A couple black boxes

[mikaelhg]

They could also just have bought a couple of Sun Black Box [sun.com] datacenters in a truck container.

Datacenter????

[Critical Facilities]

Pipe's DC3 facility will be about 4,800 square feet and will be able to accommodate 170 server racks.

I'm sorry, but 4,800 square feet and room/capacity for 170 server racks is a SERVER ROOM not a DATACENTER. I'm not trying to troll here, but this mis-use of the word datacenter gets old. The time/effort/planning/money it takes to build a datacenter is exponentially more complicated than to upfit an area to accommodate a few server racks.

In short, sticking in a few Liebert CRACs and a little 150kva UPS does not constitute "building a datacenter".

Sun has your covered there

[invisik]

Project Black Box. Just drop it off in the parking lot and plug it in.

http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/index.jsp [sun.com]

-m

Call me when they've kept it running for a year

[progprog]

Building something in a hurry is not an accomplishment in itself. Keeping it well-maintained is the real challenge.

Would you rather slap together a DIY PC in 15 minutes or spend time ensuring your cables are positioned to allow good airflow, etc? Same principle applies.