since there is no air conditioning, you don't have a condensation problem

No, it's not HVAC induced condensation. Meteorologists call it the dew point.

Right at this moment, the temp is 53.3F with a relative humidity of 78%. The dew point is 47F.

You're suppose to run a datacenter between 40% to 60% relative humidity. Without a system in place to dry the air, they're asking for corrosion on parts.

You can't say computers are corrosion proof either. When I worked in a computer store, we had computers come in all the time that were in houses with no HVAC, so they were exposed to outdoor humidity.

I left some old gear in a friends garage for a while. One of the units was a used Catalyst 5000, with cards I didn't really care about. When I put it in the garage, it was in functional condition.

I decided to bring it back up to play with. There was corrosion on the line card handles, and I'm sure corrosion inside. Nothing looked bright and clean. There was visible corrosion on the cat5 pins (for the cat5 ports). When I took it out, it barely worked with lots of errors. Reseating the cards didn't help at all. I don't know (or care) which parts went bad, I sent it off for electronic scrap recycling.

Someone's going to be really pissed off when they spent a fortune on servers that have to be trashed because they stop working properly.

There are other parts machines in the garage too. I only go to them for fans, power supplies, etc. I had already pulled out all the memory and CPUs. Sometimes they still work. Sometimes they don't.

Specs have some wild numbers on them. Some say they operate in 10% to 90% humidity. Sure, they *can* run in it for a while. They aren't expected to survive in that kind of temperature indefinitely. I've seen some specs that say they'll operate over 120F. Sure, for a very short time. I had one place argue with me because the spec showed wild numbers, but they were already experiencing hardware failures for operating servers in an uncooled server room (the HVAC broke, and they didn't want to fix it).

I should make an obligatory reference to Jurassic Park. :)

I was guessing by the fact that they had employees accessing the building, and parking lots, that it was a facility that had some sort of access.

Technically, it's just where you're buying the connection. Netflix are already at a shitload of peerings.

AS2096 - 170 peers - http://bgp.he.net/AS2906
AS40027 - dead since Feb 23, 2012 - http://bgp.he.net/AS40027
AS55095 - 2 BGP peers - http://bgp.he.net/AS55095

So now I'm even more confused to WTF they're bitching about.

Did you look at their floorplan? There are huge wedge shaped gaps.

Or lets do math. For the sake of argument, lets say that the diagram in their virtual tour was to scale. We're also going to say that each rack is a standard 19" rack, taking up 22" each. That can be wrong, but it's what I'm using for measurement.

The entire circular structure has an area of 24,052 sq/ft.
A square structure on the same property would be 30,625 sq/ft
The circular structure wastes 6,573 sq/ft.

Each pod, with a 3' buffer on each end, and a 3' buffer between rows would have a footprint of 768.4 sq/ft. Since I only included one aisle buffer on each (since they share common aisle), add one more aisle at 102 sq/ft.

The total datacenter rack space is really 3,944 sq/ft.

In the difference between the round and square structure, you could put all the racks and aisles. and still have 26,681 sq/ft.

Or about the size of two Olympic size swimming pools.

Or 0.017 LoC.

Or 53,362 bread boxes one layer deep.

Or you could tile the floor of the wasted space with approximately 106,724 AOL CDs, which coincidentally is about half of the total number of AOL CDs received in Centennial, Colorado in one bulk mailing. Unfortunately, it will be very ugly, because you're trying to tile a square floor with round objects which has lots of wasted space.

I could dazzle you with more numbers, but you've already started cursing me, and I really don't care.

(really? Cogent? really really? Well done, Netflix. Not pinching any pennies, at all)

It seems most people either don't know about who's service is how good, or they ignore it.

But hey, they could have gone with Internap. Did they ever lay any of their own fiber, or are they still pushing traffic over the cheapest possible transit?

So?

I used to run a big adult site. We wanted servers closer to the customers for speed. We made enough that we didn't really care about the connection costs. We'd put up server farms around the world where it suited our customers best.

We owned every piece of equipment in our cabinet or cage (depending on the location). The provider equipment ended at the fiber they dropped to us, and the power outlets.

Netflix was hosted with Amazon for a while. A couple years ago, they claimed to have started their own CDN.

Their own CDN site talks about putting Netflix gear out for free. So they are basically saying they want the free ride. No one gets rack space, power, and connections for free. The right thing to do would be to lease the space like everyone else does.

But hey, they're loving to cry about being treated unfairly. They are the loudest ones about it. Honestly, other than speed complaints that are usually a fault, not a conspiracy, I don't know of anyone else talking about the same thing.

It is possible that the world is ganging up on Netflix. It happened to Cogent, more than once. That was mostly they refused to pay on their contractual obligations.

As described, after looking at their materials, I don't see an advantage to the radial design over a grid design. There is nothing to that which would improve airflow, and it leaves huge underutilized areas.

On the other hand, a traditional grid design optimizes the space, and it would still allow for the same airflow.

It's not a matter of being round, or having dead space, it's simple things we teach children. Square boxes don't fit through round holes. Round objects don't stack optimally.

One of the Equinix datacenters in Los Angeles (previously Pihana Pacific) has all of it's cooling on one side of the room, and returns on the other side. Each row is basically a wind tunnel. There is no appreciable temperature difference between the two sides. Both the front and back of the cabinets have the same airflow, and maintain roughly the same temperature.

As far as the total power load, they could keep the load the same, and have almost half of the building for just storage.

Of course, a square building that the industry uses as a standard for this kind of work, would not make the news. No one would be talking about it.

I guess if they have money to burn and real estate to waste, it doesn't matter what shape they make it or how much space is underutilized.

Did you notice that he talked about the doors to the warm side? Controlled and logged access. And just a couple seconds later he says the top of the pods are all open to the common upper area. I'd hope they'll have something in the way, but I doubt it would be anything that bolt cutters (or just tin snips) and a few minutes would have a problem with.

Particle filtration does not mean it dehumidifies.

You can take a look at their official page. http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/about/initiatives/data-center-west.cfm

The tour video and text talk about plants outside filtering. The video around 3 minutes, shows additional filtering inside.

I suspect prevailing winds will really screw with the site cooling.

The "Virtual tour" has more details than the rest. Nothing about humidity.

Their security seems odd. They talk about the security being very strict. The video shows the inside of each "pod" to be open to the common hot air area in the upper part of the roof. So they have security, but you can get around it by not going through the doors. {sigh}

I never got the idea of sticking square boxes in a round hole. They're wasting a lot of good real estate by leaving all that extra space between the servers.

It seems like it was drawn up with an ideal world in mind, which usually doesn't translate well to the real world.

chaotic_evil supersedes the evil bit, being chaos and all. :)

I didn't know nuclear plants were powered by the elderly. They told me grandma passed, and was in a better place. No one said that was inside a reactor.

echo "chaotic_evil" > /proc/morality

That's why it hasn't been working for you.

There's also a kernel patch on evil.org to change the default setting. With the standard kernel, it is set to "lawful_neutral". In that mode, it will honk and swerve for a little old lady crossing the street.

lawful_good would stop, and offer her a ride.

chaotic_evil will run her over, back up and do it again, and the lower loot collection hook will deploy to take her purse.

You have great management potential. :)

We could run that idea up the flagpole, to the cloud, to have a meeting of the minds. Then we could do lunch. Have your people call my people, and we'll set up a thing.

I think I just made myself nauseous writing that.