

Google's Floating Datacenters (Think Oil Rigs) - furiouslol
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9937

======
icey
It never ceases to amaze me that all of these things that Google does are
built on the backs of _people clicking advertisements_.

They are building floating power plants so we can find out what Abraham
Lincoln's favorite color is faster!

~~~
biohacker42
There's an old saying that half of advertising is wasted, but you never know
which half.

Now imagine all that is spent on marketing and advertising and imagine google
reducing the waste by even a little bit. That's worth a lot.

But I too am amazed that old ladies in middle America on fixed income are
pretty much 99% of the ad market.

~~~
netcan
_But I too am amazed that old ladies in middle America on fixed income are
pretty much 99% of the ad market._

That's not really true of adwords. The whole 'lower-middle wage housewife
interested in sweepstakes' persona were the ones that clicked on banner ads,
10 years ago. Anyway, the way ppc adversising is structured these days, 'most
clicks' & 'most advertising spending' are not the same thing.

 _There's an old saying that half of advertising is wasted, but you never know
which half._

That's the point of adwords. You know which half. Roughly anyway.

------
andreyf
I love how there is something practical about building floating data centers,
as if the coolness factor wasn't enough.

~~~
biohacker42
I wonder how much of the practicality is land/electricity costs and how much
is regulation/taxes flight?

~~~
greyman
The later could be considered as "practicality" as well.

~~~
biohacker42
Absolutely, but I bet it won't be long before the government tries to tax
offshore data centers as well.

~~~
lief79
They'd have to treat them the same as oil rigs, at least in theory.

Wow, I've never seen a scenario where I pictured google on the same side as
oil lobbyists.

------
jwilliams
I think this is a fascinating concept.

That said, I've seen equipment that comes back from vessels and oil rigs.
Aside from the sheer messiness of the oil rig, the environment (salt,
corrosion, water) can be pretty brutal... Solvable naturally, but a hassle.

~~~
khafra
It's good that an entity with the resources and creativity of Google is
working on the problem now, so when the oceans rise and separate us into
floating colonies with the occasional gilled mutant, we can still get reliable
commodity computer hardware.

------
pibefision
In the Oil Rigs, there are people working daily.

Who are going to be the sysadmin or security personal working on this data
center?

~~~
fauigerzigerk
That thought crossed my mind as well. But since these installations are so
close to shore, workers can be ferried there pretty easily. So they avoid all
the trouble and cost that oil companies have with people actually living
there.

But what about evacuations in case of bad storms? Have they just invented a
new type of outage? :-)

------
yan
I am wondering if this can have any negative ecological side-effects. I know a
large issue with nuclear powerplants was them using local rivers for cooling.
In the end, they raised the temperature of local lakes enough to make algae
produce less oxygen, fish be wiped out, and overall adversely effect water
life.

If you put enough of these in close proximity (the wake/wind 'sweetspots'),
can they potentially heat up their surroundings enough to make a difference? I
understand the ocean is a different beast from lakes, but if you can heat up a
square mile, that's a lot of sea life existing in that mile. As quoted, 40MW
of power is not exactly little heat.

------
menloparkbum
Floating & wave power is cool, but the offshore oil rig style datacenter was
tried way back in 2000 and it wasn't a big success.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havenco>

------
jonknee
These will be the first sysadmins that get their own series on Discovery or
History.

------
danielrhodes
I wonder if they plan to abandon the use of cheap commodity servers for these
data centers since the cost of replacing a malfunctioning server becomes much
higher.

~~~
hugh
Not really that much higher.

It's not like they'd ship a new one out from the mainland every time one
failed -- they'd have a huge stack of spares sitting around on the rig and
replenish it every now and then.

------
dcurtis
Sounds like Google and Peter Thiel should talk.

------
newsit
If in neutral waters this could save them from troubles with jurisdiction and
differences in the legislation between EU, USA, China, Russia etc.

~~~
Angostura
Which suspect would pale insignificance compared to the threat from the new
generation of pirate that such an installation would spawn.

Visions of a parrot sitting on someone's shoulder squawking "pieces of RAM".

------
raheemm
Its really intriguing how Google, in spite of its ever-growing size, is able
to come up with out of the box solutions.

------
cmars232
Datacenters... sure that's what they want you to think. Haven't you read Snow
Crash?!

------
gills
Welcome to a whole new breed of digital pirate?

------
yan
haha, we just realized that future digital pirates can be /actual pirates/.

------
newt0311
Instead of untested wind farms on liners, why not just use nuclear power. It
is well tested (think aircraft carriers). Furthermore, while such a reactor
may need fuel and disposal services, the wind farms will likely also require
spare parts so the self sustenance thing may come out to be even or even in
the favor of nuclear. Furthermore, nuclear reactors have a significantly
better space/watt ratio allowing for more space for crew and servers.

There are other factors. Wind is intermittent -- not good for servers which
have to be active 24/7. To use it would require massive (bigger even than what
is already there) batteries which themselves would entail a massive extra
cost. Nuclear power also allows easy desalination of sea water which (I
assume) would be required for cooling sensitive electronic equipment
(expensive servers).

The red tape associated with such an idea would be pretty scary though.

~~~
j1o1h1n
You forgot the cost of hiring of mercenaries to protect your nukes from
pirates.

~~~
newt0311
good point. data centers do not have their own military contingent like navy
aircraft carriers. Wonder what that does to the cost equation. It seems to be
somewhat fixed so if we make this big enough...

One could also try different technologies which make it harder to weaponize
the nuclear fuel like pebble bed reactors but then thats never been deployed
on a ship.

~~~
netcan
I imagine that Google has a clean tech agenda here as well as a 'how do I cool
& power a data center' agenda.

------
officiallyrad
Tracking the spread of this trend around the world...

<http://edopter.com/trends/Offshore_Data_Centers>

------
jsmcgd
God bless the SS Google and all who search with her!

------
kilowatt
Now they can do search AND monkey knife fights! Will Google's wonders never
cease?

