Now for something completely different ... startup IDS is pitching floating data centers. Some good discussion on the topic here and here.
Maybe the understatement of the year comes from a commenter at datacenterknowledge, when he said
I guess I'd have a few concerns.
To say the least!
As this photo from the company's brochure shows, the plan is to have "containerized data centers" on deck, with more conventional data centers below decks. The idea is to have them more or less permanently moored at docks, so their marketing picture is a bit misleading. I suppose that would be essential for both power and bandwidth reasons.
In any case, the problems here could be enormous. For starters, I can think of concerns over
- Sinking.
- Motion.
- Saltwater-Induced Corrosion.
- Tsunamis.
- Hurricanes.
- Terrorism.
- Commercial Extortion.
- Drunken Fisherman.
About the only things these would do better is to limit physical access and (perhaps) dissipate heat. For that matter, this is really just a band-aid solution to the fundamental problems that plague data centers today - energy consumption, heat dissipation, and most often the simple need for more space.
This is no solution for the core problems - it simply masks them with a different (pardon the pun) container.
A Better Plan
The beginning of a real solution is to make the decision to go to a commodity infrastructure, then utilize an application fabric to provide scalability, reliability, and simple operations for the apps and their underlying (and now commoditized) infrastructure.
Then you can select for metrics like capacity-per-watt and / or capacity-for-the-budget, without compromising scale, reliability, or operational integrity in any manner.
You can even deploy in a cloud if you'd like.
The point is you'll have the choice to do what makes the most sense, with no need to pick up a bunch of additional problems from problematic data centers.
