221–230 of 250 posts
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If this actually worked, there would be boats sitting in the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific with computers on them. I have no idea if they are sitting there, but I'm pretty sure if it was an idea that worked, it would be done by now.
It's a fairly common (and silly) dismissal of any new effort that "if it worked, someone else would already be doing it".
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FYI, "Buy N Large" was the fictional Costco-like store from Pixar's WALL-E.
Noting that the domain byandlarge.com was registered in 1998 by a "domainer". Interesting. The movie came out in 2008. But the film concept dates to the mid 90's so most likely that concept was the first use of that name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E
With movable data centers, Google can easily move them across oceans, as popularity and usage of different Google services inevitably shifts across countries over time, in order to be closer to wherever their users are to reduce network latency. For example an "Orkut data center" would have been very useful to Google in 2008, when they announced they were moving its operations to Brazil because somewhat unpredictably…
Or you could just shift the processes to a newly commissioned, and therefore cheaper per cpu/ram/storage per dollar!
Google was granted a patent in 2009 for a floating data center Sigh, there is a patent on floating data centers? For fuck's sake...
There's a patent for one specific, detailed design for a floating datacenter. Not for the mere idea of a floating datacenter.
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Would servers be affected by the instability of the ocean? That is, if they use spinning drives, would the heave and ho of the ocean affect it? Would that affect other electronics and components?
I doubt the heave and ho of the ocean would affect spinning disks like hard drives. We used to put hard drives in iPods that got thrown around by people jogging with few failures. What is a concern is salt water, wind blowing the surface of of the ocean can add salt into the air that will eventually get into the containers. Salt moisture will be a huge long term problem.
Something similar is being outfitted in Portland, ME. http://www.pressherald.com/news/Clues_emerging_about_mystery... The OP is a much better article (The Press Herald is garbage). My original guess for the barge-building in Portland was a ocean-based prison facility for the government to use for interrogations. But it's seeming like the floating data center idea is much more likely.
I suppose you might build a datacenter there and then ship it to some third-world port where you don't want to do construction.
While I love the idea of a gmail datacenter in international waters with automatic guns to deter boarders, that really wouldn't fit Google's current political strategy.
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I'll try to find the link in a moment, but Microsoft was doing something like this 5+ years back. The premise was similar to Google using commodity hardware in their datacenters. Throw together "compute blocks", set them all up and when performance degrades sufficiently you remove the container and install a new one in its place. EDIT: Also, I'm surprised I got the time right, for some reason 2005-2012 is one big blu…
The newest Azure data center in Iowa(?) was going to be open air. Basically a pile of these containers in a field, with a big fence over it and a roof similar to a big car-port (no walls). They figured it was going to be better for cooling.