What Data Center Designers Can Learn From Legos 210
1sockchuck writes "It takes most companies at least a year to build a new data center. Digital Realty Trust says it can build a new data center in just 20 weeks using standard designs and modular components that can be assembled on site. The company equates its 'building blocks' approach to data centers to building with Legos — albeit with customized parts (i.e. the Millennium Falcon Lego kit). Microsoft is taking a similar approach, packaging generators, switchgear and UPS units into pre-assembled components for rapid assembly. Is this the future of data center design?"
More Present Than Future ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this the future of data center design?
I'm going to assume you're talking very very large data centers here as it wouldn't make sense to streamline this for a few "blocks." But I think this is an already pretty pervasive idea. Why, we have already talked about Google's ideas on server 'blocks' [slashdot.org] and data 'pod' [slashdot.org] technology for their sharded databases. While I'm not sure if this high level design inherently affects relational databases negatively, it sure seems to be the future of data centers.
Google's strategy sounds even more like homogeneous Lego blocks than either of the two article's solutions.
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While I'm not sure if this high level design inherently affects relational databases negatively, it sure seems to be the future of data centers.
If you build apps using Google App Engine, the APIs offer you an API to BigTable [wikipedia.org], a non-relational data store. There is no relational database support.
Legos (Score:5, Informative)
The plural of "lego" is "lego".
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I played with Legos when I was a kid and my kids play with Legos now. They don't play with "Lego" as they think that refers to a single modular building brick.
I know a lot of other kids that play with Legos that don't have the time or inclination to say they play with "Lego", "Lego bricks", "Lego playsets", or "Lego compatible modular building playsets". They just play with Legos.
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It's a shame really, instead of being an imaginative open process it has become following the instructions to make the model in the right way. Having said that my kids will do this once and then combine bits from the various kits and use them in the good old way to make something entirely different
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Yes, but after building them according to the instructions, who actually played with them for more than a minute before disassembling them and rebuilding them using parts from various kits? I had quite a few of the "space patrol" lego kits, so I ended up with a lot of wings, cockpits, engines, etc., and used them to make cool spaceships, rovers, and stations of my own design.
I found that building things with rectangular pieces was very boring unless you wanted to build nothing other than houses, or were bui
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I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, as it's teaching your kids how to follow instructions. I'll admit to despairing when the kid from next door to my parents brought his Lego X-Wing over, which clearly hadn't been built properly and was almost falling apart.
What your kids are doing is exactly what I used to do, and I think it works in a way because with model kits, you get a larger variety of pieces, which allows you to be more imaginative in what you build. I always found the variety of pieces
LEGO not Legos (Score:2)
Being an Adult Fan of LEGO, I used to share the opinion that it was sad that they had so many custom parts.
It's true, to an extent, but the new bricks simply open up new possibilities. I build the sets because those LEGO designers show some true genius sometimes in their construction techniques... but even they don't always get it right, and people modify the plans all the time.
Moreover, the idea is basically that you don't HAVE to follow the directions, and even if you do, you can then take it apart and c
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Let me guess: You threw them at each other. And this is how it came that you have to stay in the basement now. Right? *ducks* ^^
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Do they refer to an individual brick as "a lego"? That just sounds wrong to me.
Sort of like referring to a single water molecule as "a water", and then referring to a collection of water molecules, say a glassful, as "waters".
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Can someone explain the different rules used by American English?
The "legos" plural form is a good example, but how about the use of mixed tense in a single sentence like "Did you brush your teeth yet?"
The different pronunciation rules are interesting as well. For example, in most English speaking countries Iraq is "ee-rack" but in the US it's "Eye-rack". Another good example is 'solder', in standard English "sol-der" but in American "sod-er" (silent "l").
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Absolutely not.
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Over here, one speaks the Queen's english. If you wish to speak correctly, copy the Queen.
If you want to talk like a Yank, raise your voice, raise it again, add some twang and use a lot of TLAs.
And it's Lego by the way. Anyone saying different is just being difficult. As for the single block argument: one'er, two'er, eight'er, flat-eight...
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The Queen's English is not standard. Standard English is what the BBC news presenters (used to) use. Approximately 3 words per second, largely accent free delivery.
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This reminds me of a sign in an antique store: "You break it you bought it"
I guess that means we get to name it, too.
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That was pretty funny, and also missing a comma :)
Actually, misusing the comma must be the most common English mistake. "Eats, shoots and leaves" is the classic example.
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I thought of another good one: "I could care less". Seems to be the American version of "I couldn't care less", with the same meaning but appearing to say exactly the opposite.
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That's sarcasm. Welcome to America, enjoy your stay.
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That's stupid American sarcasm. What do you mean by a sarcastic "I could care less"? That you care a lot? Or not at all? It's stupid on the face of it and indefensible.
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Sarcasm:
When I say the opposite of what I mean. If you're too dumb to figure out that I meant the opposite, I laugh at you.
Re: What drives American English (Score:2)
If you compare
a) British/Canadian/Indian/Australian/NZ English
b) U.S. English
spelling and pronunciation,
it is invariably the case that the American version (b) is the one that reflects either -
ignorance of special rules of the language and therefore a resort to simplified general rules,
or a lazier and more utilitarian use of a subset of the language vocabulary and its grammar rules.
e.g. (First form not used by most Americans)
-Lego plural of Lego is a special case (possibly related to Latin or Greek derived
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through instead of thru is special-case pronunciation and spelling
Even in America, "thru" is thoroughly non-standard spelling. I've never understood what the hell possesses people to spell the word that way, to be honest.
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I'm don't think it's just ignorance on the American part. As I understand it, there was a concerted effort to simplify the language, the most obvious result of which is the simplified spelling of words like "night", "light", "analogue", "catalogue", "through" etc.
What I find interesting is that Americans seem to actively try to use what would be considered in academic circles as incorrect English. In the UK there are widely varying accents and many local words or phrases, but they do tend to follow at least
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Ironically, there's a good argument that, because human memory works on a "remember the exceptions" basis, a simpler set of rules will encourage forgetting the existence or meaning of some words, and thus will lead to reduction in usable vocabulary. Some words were remembered (their existence remembered and their meaning remembered) BECAUSE of their unusual grammar or spelling rule, and/or the word family lineage patterns that marble-texture the full version of English.
Remove this texture and these landmark
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Like, you know, I go: ...words with no guts no power.
When we eviscerate and castrate the language,
we get...
He goes:
Then she goes:
As if
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"Did you brush your teeth yet?" is incorrect.
It should be:
"Have you brushed your teeth yet?"
or
"Did you brush your teeth already?"
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That is wrong too. You should say "Have you brushed your teeth already?"
You can't have "already" and "did", the tense does not match. If you want to use "did", you need to say "did you brush your teeth earlier?".
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I think that should be "Did you already brush your teeth?"
I could be wrong, but my spidey-sense is tingling. I'm usually right about these things.
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By "standard" I mean the standard rules of spelling and pronunciation, either British or American.
To be fair, English is a horribly inconsistent language. Most common verbs are irregular. Rules they teach you at school like "i before e except after c" have lots of exceptions etc.
You are of course right about the very strong accents we have here, but at least I can explain them in terms of rules.
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To be fair, English is a horribly inconsistent language.
My favorite example of this is the diphthong "ough". It can be pronounced at least five different ways.
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Cough and thought are the same, sorry.
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Eh? "Cough" is pronounced like "off". "Thought" is pronounced like "aww".
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S-O-L-D-E-R [merriam-webster.com], not soldier.
officially its an adjective (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at the website:
http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=fairplay [lego.com]
Of course if its an adjective then "legos" is nonsense.
In common usage it is in fact a noun: the OED defines "Lego" as a noun. The plural of a noun has an 's', with the handful of well-established exceptions.
Who decided that LEGO was an exception? Not the LEGO Group who say its only an adjective. So I think its the fact that the LEGO Group never says "LEGOs" (since they always uses it as an adjective) caused misguided pedantic people (or otherwise any lover of arbitrary rules) to decide that its a plural noun.
So put me in the legos camp. :)
Re:Legos (Score:4, Insightful)
The plural of "lego" is "lego".
The distinction only matters to trademark lawyers, because to "protect" their trademark they would argue that there's no such thing as a "Lego" noun, only an adjective.
The rest of us non-pedants don't give a shit and call them Legos, because in everyday English each individual brick is an individual Lego. Saying "I built this house out of Lego!" sounds prissy and affected. If you disagree, you ought to look deep inside your personality and consider whether *you* are prissy and affected.
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While I wouldn't say "I built this house out of Lego", I would say "Hey! Look at this Lego house I built!"
In fact, now that I think about it, I probably would say "I built this house out of lego (lowercase l)" because thats what it is. I have a box of lego, not a box of legos. I give the gift of lego to my nephew, not legos. When I need to clean up, I don't clean up my legos, but my lego.
Meh .. I guess I'm prissy and affected, have been since I was a wee boy, calling it lego. Poor me.
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As soon as I saw the topic, I giggled, wondering how many posts it would take before the pedantic undercurrent brought this up :-)
1 Lego brick, 2 Lego bricks (Score:2)
1 moose, 2 moose. 1 sheep, 2 sheep. 1 aircraft, 2 aircraft. 1 head of cattle, 2 head of cattle.[1] 1 bison, 2 bison, M.Bison [wikipedia.org]. Or pretty much every word in Japanese or Chinese. But trademarks are adjectives, and in English, adjectives generally precede nouns. So the plural of "Lego brick" is "Lego bricks".
[1] "Head of cattle" is a precise epicene (gender-neutral) word for what is commonly called a "bull" or "cow".
Re:1 Lego brick, 2 Lego bricks (Score:5, Funny)
So IPod is an adjective? I am no native speaker but that doesn't sound right (but then again, neither do the IPod earphones)
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Proper adjective [wikipedia.org]:
A trademark is a distinctive sign used by a business to identify its products to consumers. When a trademark is a word used adjectivally, it is capitalized and hence is a proper adjective. Intellectual property lawyers sometimes advise corporations to use their trademarks only as proper adjectives, not as proper nouns. By this theory, a trademark is not the name of a product, but rather a signifier of the source of the product.
For example, in the sentence "I need to blow my nose; do you have any Kleenex?", the word Kleenex is a proper noun, used to name the product being discussed. This is perfectly acceptable English usage, from a grammatical perspective. It would also be acceptable to say, "I need to blow my nose; do you have any Kleenex facial tissue?", where the word Kleenex is a proper adjective. The Kimberly-Clark Corporation (which owns the trademark Kleenex) takes care to use the word only as a proper adjective. The legal risk is that a trademark used as a noun can become genericized, in which case other businesses could legally use the word to refer to their products. This happened to the word "elevator", for example, which used to be a trademark but is now a common noun.
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So IPod is an adjective? I am no native speaker but that doesn't sound right
The law often doesn't sound right. The word "iPod" legally means "made or endorsed by Apple Inc."; hence iPod player, iPod headphones, iPod dock.
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Except zipper and kleenex and uggs and coke and big mac and...
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It is onomonopoea for what you say when you see someone wearing Uggs shoes.
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Actually, what's really sad, I've seen the use of "fishes" a LOT in technical writing in the environmental/ecological sciences.
It makes me cry.
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You know what's worse? I've seen it in actual dictionaries.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fish [merriam-webster.com]
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'Fish' is the plural of 'fish'. 'Fishes' refers to a taxonomic group (now largely out of favour), which is why you see it in technical writing.
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Perhaps you can cry that there are different collective nouns (other than "school" of course) for different species of fish.
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I think you're confusing that with the plural of 'mouse', which everyone of a certain age knows is 'meeses'.
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I hate that word to pieces!
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Also, it's LEGO bricks or LEGO pieces, or LEGO .
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Legos is simply short for "LEGO(tm) bricks". Same as googling is short for "Searching with Google".
If everybody understands it, it is more efficient. And humans are lazy for a reason. Because it saves important resources when you add it all up.
So why not?
Hell, you could also ask us to call cars "auto-mobile horse carriages". ^^ (In Germany, we call them "Autos", stemming from this.)
No, the future is heavy customization. Psych! (Score:2, Interesting)
Someone's going to retort that this is only because America hasn't built a new nuke power plant in ages, but the fact of the matter is that nuke power in Canada and France is reliable, efficient, and cheap because they have settled on a standard plant design. Contrast this with the fully customized design for each American nuke plant and you can see why we still consider nuclear power to be expensive and dangerous.
Extend this to software design. Sure, using standard libraries may mean that you are possibly
Why not for computers as well? (Score:2)
I had this idea ages ago: computer blocks, which could plug together. Storage, processors, media, PSUs, batteries, interfaces... just bricks that you stack together using some universal power-and-data bus connector on each plug (imagine Lego blocks about eight inches long).
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Congratulations, you've invented a variation on the S-100 bus [wikipedia.org].
Now with the ability to do external PCI express, this could be reasonably possible again, maybe. I'd think you'd have big signal integrity problems.
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Thermaltake has a new modular case that is similar to that. [techpowerup.com]
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After seeing 2001 and 2010 I envisioned the same thing, but I imagined them being powered by induction and optical data connections. That way they're waterproof. Today I would probably also imagine in some water connections for cooling — all the liabilities thereof vanish when you're not using electrical connections. Some twenty years later, we're still using copper-fingered plastic sockets :(
lego in the plural (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:lego in the plural (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think you mean Kleenices.
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It's due to trademark laws... the IP lawyers where I work remind us that trademarked brand terms should be used as adjectives and not nouns (despite the fact that they're generally referred to as nouns amongst "lay people"). For instance, Apple refers to the iPod(R) as the "iPod(R) mobile digital device" if you dig deeply into their docs.
It's the same thing for Lego... they're Lego(R) bricks, despite the common vernacular of Legos. :D
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The Kleenex thing has always fascinated me as it hasn't made the leap across the Atlantic. In the UK you ask for a tissue or a hankie, but never a Kleenex. Here, Kleenex is still very much a specific brand. To my knowledge this is also the case with Xerox. We photocopy things, we don't Xerox them.
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I often find that people who argue detailed semantics are people who have nothing worthwhile to contribute
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Obligatory Pedant (Score:2)
You should say "Lego Bricks", not "Legos".
"Lego" is the name of the company.
Legolas? (Score:2)
Wow, 50 posts about legos (Score:5, Insightful)
And two about data centers.
News for nerds, or news for obsessive man children?
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A good portion of us spend all day building/operating data centers, and the rest of us likely spend our day writing software that will go in those data centers in some fashion or other - forgive us if we hear LEGO and take a short break to go "WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE I LOVES THOSE"
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You can. It's that "-" icon next to the headline on the front page.
Demand matters (Score:4, Interesting)
"The company equates its "building blocks" approach to data centers to building with Legos -- albeit with customized parts (i.e. the Millennium Falcon Lego kit). Microsoft is taking a similar approach, packaging generators, switchgear and UPS units into pre-assembled components for rapid assembly. Is this the future of data center design?"
It only makes sense to maintain the infrastructure to build the building blocks so long as data centers are being rolled out at a furious pace - something that cannot continue forever.
I suspect the 'Lego' builders are betting on vendor lock-in to feed the bottom line over the long term. Once you buy their bricks, you're pretty much stuck with their interface and thus will be coming back to them for upgrades and renovation.
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Not necessarily. The high-build rate just funds the building of the Lego-like datacenter infrastructure. Then once that infrastructure (design, manufacturing, distribution, etc.) is paid for, it becomes cost effective to build all datacenters that way because it's now cheaper and faster. And the guy building them makes money hand-over-foot.
Stop, dammit! (Score:2)
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Sure. They're like LEGO, right?
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The thread isn't about data centres, it's about LEGO bricks. Look at the headline:
What Data Center Designers Can Learn From Legos
Thus, it's obviously about LEGO bricks and what data centre designers can learn from them — which isn't necessarily limited to things relevant to data centre design.
I learned a lot from lego bricks (Score:5, Interesting)
I learned that given a large enough supply of Lego bricks, their flaws become readily apparent. We owned a day care centre, so I had literally twenty pounds or more Lego bricks at my disposal (after hours and then after we sold the centre).
Legos are heavily dependent on gravity, the gripping power of a brick is impressive (especially if they are new), but torque is more impressive. There is a limit to how far you can build a Lego ledge, and that includes shoring it up with Lego bracing (diagonal Lego bracing is more susceptible to torque). The torque doesn't apply well to a brick that's designed for straight down pressure.
Legos are heavily bound by gravity. The compressive forces of the walls provide grip. In my attempts to rebuild cathedral wall structures, the compression could not be balanced between the flying buttresses and the inner walls, so the buttresses mainly provided a stabilizing effect. The problem was that at about five or so feet, the bottom bricks would not hold because the weight of the bricks above expanded the plastic enough to negate the brick's grip.
Legos provide little resistance to upward pressure (by design this is how you release them, to a degree). This means that as structures sway, you effectively reduce the gripping power of some connection within the structure. This is the equivalent to stress related failure. A larger Lego structure must be glued or it will fail due to these internal forces.
Finally if you attempt to fix some of these issues by sandwiching critical joints, you add mass, which compounds the problem in other joints. Shoring up those eventually just increases the number of locations where failure could occur and statistics steps in and assures at least one failure, somewhere.
I won't even go into the issues with worn bricks, because those are obvious.
Few data centres expand to the size of our largest data centres, but by "designing like Lego" we will simplify things. The danger is that we might standardize on an architecture that has built-in limits. The architecture we currently have isn't as clean in vision as a Lego brick, but it already scales better than the Lego brick, even if it needs to do so by the default structure being slightly less elegant.
These Lego data centre visionaries have the right goal, making it simple, but they might be going about it in the wrong way. I've never heard a rational argument detailing how Lego bricks and data centre components are the same, so this might turn out to be a bad analogy implemented in hardware. Time will tell, but the centres we currently have did not come as the result of people deliberately trying to make data centres more complex.
Re:I learned a lot from lego bricks (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the solution is pretty much similar to the solution that Lego uses when they come up against the limitations of their pieces. They introduce additional pieces. You could even think of the glue that is used on larger structures in this way. It wasn't one of the original elements, but all of those original elements were designed with enough flexibility that they can be glued together.
The point of standardization isn't necessarily to come up with a complete system that will cover any and every possible need throughout the past, present, and future. It's to provide some useful building blocks to make the easy 90% of a project even easier. And if done well, the standardization will allow for enough flexibility to make that last 10% possible. And since you saved so much time and money on that first 90% because you had all those nice standard and mass produced parts to choose from, you'll have extra resources to really get the final details right.
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While I agree with you in sentiment, I still arrive back at my questions, "How do the current standards in place not facilitate the current server farms in place?", and "How does a Lego analogy hold up at the scale we are talking about?"
Most Lego bricks have only eight nubs on the top. Yes, there are custom bricks, but the bulk of the Lego trade is the 2x4. How does that scale when you need to attach 8 2x4s to the top of a 2x4? Eight nubs could provide eight points of connection, but geometry gets in the
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Well yeah, if your standard sucks, it's going to cause problems down the road. If it sucks so bad that you have to ignore it 80% of the time in order to get anything done, then it's not really a standard anymore.
I wasn't defending a particular standard for this application as much as I was trying to express that very often the benefits of having a standard easily outweigh the downsides.
I'm not sure how closely one would want to pattern a data center standard after the system that lego uses. I think that usi
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Oh my God, will everyone stop talking about LEGO and... Oh, you DID talk about data centers.
Software design and buildings in general (Score:2, Interesting)
Why can't conventional buildings use this concept? Granted you wouldn't do it on a single family house, but when you
Glow blocks? (Score:2)
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Needs expand with available capacity.
If the data processing is central to your business, it doesn't make sense to outsource it.
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I think a single human brain, connected properly and whatnot, could be used as a server farm. There's multi-threading support aplenty, lots and lots of storage and once you take away the sub-processses like emotion and such, there's even an abundance of computing power. Therefore, the future of data centers is in jars of glass filled with nutritional liquid.
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Oh, geez, as if either of those things needed more infection vectors!
Blood-brain firewall is the new blood-brain barrier?
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You have a good point. The millions it costs to build a datacenter could probably be better spent sending Amazon EC2 hundreds of thousands a month. Instead of having to spend millions more to upgrade in 5 yrs Amazon has already done that.
Course if something were to go wrong and your data is lost or stolen it'd be hard to even get a "so
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Moore's Law means that most functions that previously required arrays of expensive hardware can be done with a single server. If your needs are greater than that, surely it makes sense to buy capacity from a cloud computing vendor such as Amazon EC2.
This only makes sense if there are significant economies of scale in building larger data centers.
But although data centres are certainly needed now, do they really have a 'future'?
I work for an insurance TPA [wikipedia.org]. We have multiple servers, for different security levels (production, FTP, dev, etc), different OSes (Windows, AIX, Linux), etc. We can't use a "cloud computing" provider because of the legal protection requirements for some of the data we handle, and if that wasn't the case we'd still not be able to because of paranoid clients (like the one that doesn't even like our primary product
Latency and control (Score:2)
Latency: The speed of light is still only about 300000 kilometres a second, and the actual latencies of remote servers in practice add up to even more (especially when encryption is involved).
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Why on earth would you want to build a data centre? Moore's Law means that most functions that previously required arrays of expensive hardware can be done with a single server.
So, I take it your plan is to go into the future, and bring back servers to do today's work with tomorrow's resources? We've always managed to find new ways to use up computing power in the past, what makes you think the future will differ?
OTOH I figure the future of the data center is more distributed. There's no reason they should be quite as big as they are; their current size only create special infrastructural problems. A number of companies are now dealing in "instant" data centers which could be easi
Enterprise Mindstorms (Score:2)
Wouldn't surprise me if the Lego Group has its lawyers in attack mode as we speak.
Then how about actually partnering with Lego Group and calling it "Enterprise Mindstorms"?
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In other news another company is designing data centres based on Velcro.
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The Millennium Falcon was unique. Not only could it travel faster than light, it could travel faster than length!!!
It travelled 18 parsecs in less than 12 parsecs. Thats compression of physical space of over 33%. Just imagine a data center
where you could fit 19 inch rack mount cabinets in a 13 inch space or 56U in a 42U cabinet.
Nah.. my boss didnt believe me either.
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According to the story, that was because of space-time compression due to the close proximity of numerous black holes.
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It sounded even cooler after the explanation.
I mean, c'mon... skimming the event horizon of a black hole? That's not cool?
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Good call.
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Certainly nothing to do with LEGO which are little plastic bricks, that aren't good for halon delivery systems.
No, u. [youtube.com]