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It seems a downside would be that this uses more space. The racks are mounted horizontally. Convert an old data center to this and they'd only be able to instal

• lsc 15y ago
  Eh, squarfootage is /really cheap/ some places. Right now, it'd be much easier for me to find cheap squarfootage than cheap wattage. Unfortunately, there is something of an inverse correlation between the cost of squarefootage and the cost of bandwidth; especially at the small end of the scale, bandwidth is /extremely cheap/ here in the caltrain corridor of Silicon Valley. Squarefootage is /extremly expensive/ so you are partly correct. The thing of it is, though, there's fiber along nearly all railroad right of ways. Now, getting that fiber off of the railroad right of way and into your data center, that can be a rather large capital expense, and often when you get out in the boonies there are fewer players in the secondary markets; less competition means you pay more per unit bandwidth. But the ongoing cost, especially if you use a lot of bandwidth and can bypass most of the middlemen? might not be that high. Even in Silicon Valley, where bandwidth is cheap and squarefootage is expensive, power is even more expensive. With a very small increase in capital cost I could make my own servers 8x more space efficient; with current power costs? most data centers won't let me go any more dense than I am now, so there's no point. (Depending on the cooling system the data centers use, it can be harder to deal with one really hot rack than two racks that are each half as hot.) So really, giving me half the space and twice the power would work out just fine.