It was raining in the data center
medium.com
medium.com
As for their humidity problem, the article says little about how their badly designed chiller-less system got into a condensing situation. The original article in the Register does.[1]
This was an HVAC configuration error. The facility used evaporative cooling, which dumps heat into water by running air through a water spray or some wet surface. This raises the humidity. They somehow got the system configured so that it was recirculating air through the evaporative cooler, increasing the humidity on each pass until it hit saturation. The problem only lasted for a few hours until somebody figured out what was wrong.
They probably didn't have a union-trained stationary engineer on site. This sort of thing is covered in the apprenticeship training for a stationary engineer. Fans, dampers, and controls can all fail, which can create situations like this. Stationary engineers deal with those problems. At large data center scale, you may need one.
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/08/facebook_cloud_versu...
Edit: It's a mediocre poem.
To me it seems that actually the story about the cloud was meant to be an introduction to the remainder of the text.
The story is about how “the cloud” where we put our data is an abstract concept and that even those of us that know about data centers and servers and so on, most of us know very little about the concrete physical locations of every data center and where the individual fiber lines go in the US.
The way the introduction was done however made it seem like the point of the article was to talk about the neurological cloud that had formed in that Facebook data center. And of course they made the matters worse by then picking the title to be about that as well.
But like I said, I think it was an interesting read.
Not every word is a pretty one you can throw around, you know: what exactly about this metaphorical meeting was "non-Euclidean"?
Pipkin is a code artist, this is essentially a philosophical musing, but of the continental kind, with importance given to phenomenology, with thought on metaphilosophy and suchlike, with philosophy given as first science.
This kind of author specializes in deeper critique in that continental style. Most such works are technically worthless, but that is not the point.
It isn't even wrong.
Actually, it honestly reads like a prequel to Asimov's short story, "The Last Question". [1]
Nice place to visit if you ever get the chance, on the way to the Painted Hills for instance.
Now, the article lacks focus. It expands unecessarily on every tangent (it reached ARPANET -- drops mic). 2 or 3 pages could have been 2-3 paragraphs or references. This article lacks an editor. (Or they are payed per page -- I think it is word count actually.)
The author could state: they pick remote locations, because it is cheap and away from publicity (power hungry) and less likely to become a target. Then argue and clarify with some details. Then go to the destructive events perhaps.
Like many others, I am not sure of the goal of the article to be honest.
How is that even remotely possible? It appears that it runs up to to Mackinac City and then stops short of the bridge. The map doesn't even show the U.P.
I was at a tech conference once that had attendees states on their badges. A lady came up to me and said how cute you've got a deer jumping over the state of Michigan on your badge. Told her that's not a deer, it's part of the state ;<).
Also, the graphics are really bad, and completely distract from the already questionable piece.
That made me laugh.
"Long-haul fiber-optic cabling. Red squares mark where cables connect in nodes, many in major population centers. University of Wisconsin and ACM SIGCOMM, 2015. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~pb/tubes_final.pdf "
It is kind of too bad since two of the three articles haven't had a lot of good coverage. One being alternate cooling strategies for data centers, and the other being disrupting the moats that long haul fiber imposes.
In the UK there are canals trains tracks and motorway running next door as the geography suits.
Plain bullshit. One of the reasons Facebook and Google have datacenters in Oregon (FB at Prineville and Google at The Dalles) is the availability of cheap renewable energy from the Columbia River.
And the companies don't buy carbon offset. The author has no idea how electricity markets work. They buy renewable electricity contracts, for example:
http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/power-cooli...
The author seems more preoccupied with the sesquipedalian loquaciousness than with actual facts.
Was is just a survey of interesting datacenter phenomena? I'm still not sure.
Edit: Amusingly this post had a bunch of points and now they're gone. Maybe people don't find this comment interesting, or maybe the people who were manipulating the vote didn't like getting called out. One shall never know I suppose.
Ugh. I didn't realise that Medium had become another paywall.