Couple questions: 1. Are there integrator companies that take these building blocks and build datacenters for other companies? 2. Are these racks intended to be bought in large quantities and put into new datacenters? 3. Is liquid cooling an option? 4. Do you sell datacenters as well as just the racks? Do you have any of your own datacenters built out? 5. Tough question: if these are so competitive and good for your…
1. Not yet, we’ll see what the future holds 2. Eventually, right now we are just starting, so working closely with customers and in small quantities, but eventually that is the idea. 3. No. We are already doing very well with fans, the design means a very tiny power draw. The racks are quite quiet. 4. No. 5. Selling hardware and running a private cloud are two different businesses. The public clouds don’t also sell s…
1. Seems like you would need quite a bit of capital to be one of these integrator companies, to float the cash to buy land, build a facility and buy the racks. Does your own vs rent philosophy extend so far to also say that companies should also own the land and facility on and in which a server rack sits? Early on, Amazon talked about purpose-built datacenters being important, with huge power and internet connectivity requirements, earthquake/fire/flood protection and HVAC requirements. Sounds like the best way to go, if you have a huge amount of cash, seems like unit economics are now favoring data center costs in the billions of USD.
2. For now, would it make much sense to buy one or more of these and co-locate it with a cloud company's existing facilities in an office building? Or, if you had some space in a "good" datacenter where you leased space and sublet space, connection, power and maintenance costs to your customers, would that reduce the friction for buying one of these? Or does that essentially defeat the purpose and advantage of owning your own racks? If you remove the price of renting the rack, what's the ongoing cost to park one of these in an existing datacenter? Is that even an option?
3. From a purely mechanical perspective, the performance and efficiency advantages with liquid cooling vs. air cooling seem great. Seems like the problem is mostly around installation, maintenance, application requirements and reliability. Would be great to eventually see an integrated rack with liquid cooling plumbing hookups going directly to heat exchangers. At the cost of massively increased initial cost, maintenance cost, and with a built-in severe, catastrophic failure mode... Understood that this doesn't really make sense if these racks are being put into existing air-cooled datacenters or office buildings, which seems like it's going to be the case for awhile?
5. Too bad, seems like your prospective customers are in a similar sales funnel as people who want to rent capacity in a private cloud (and it's always nice to be your own customer!) What prevents your competitors from also selling servers? Do you think that the reason that public cloud companies don't sell servers is that they think their competitors will get ahold of the hardware and copy their technical advantages? Or is it that they have the deep pockets for building datacenters that their customers don't necessarily have, and they would rather have monthly revenue anyways?