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So... I have a really interesting anecdote on "Power over fiber" In ~2004 I was the technology designer for the Lucas Arts Presidio Campus - I designed all the
by samstave 3y ago
So... I have a really interesting anecdote on "Power over fiber"
In ~2004 I was the technology designer for the Lucas Arts Presidio Campus - I designed all the physical network, custom cable tray in the DC, the DC power infrastructure for the DC and did all the layout of the devices collapsing into the DC from ILM, Big Rock and other locations.
When we designed the network, it was the largest 10G network in the world, all based on FORCE10 equipment, as spec'd by ILM's Raleigh Mann (later netword head for Google)...
The original design was for fiber to the desktop, as they wanted all desktop machines to become a part of the render farm when not being used.
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We were doing vendor selection from the RFP and holding interviews for each vendor to present their response to the RFP (The network was ~$50 million (this was 2004, so that was a really large number back then)
In the meeting with Cisco, Cisco performed a clown show, but the CTO for Lucas seriously (remember, Cisco 6500s was the core king at the time)
Lucas CTO: "Yeah, well we have CAT6 and Fiber to the desktop. When can you give me power over fiber so I can just run fiber to the desktop"
Blank stares from everyone.
(He sadly died of heart attack shortly after)
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But here we are. We thought a fool, but I guess he was a visionary.
- mciancia 3y agoCrazy that it has been 20 years since 10G was available and it's still very uncommon outside of enterprise
- cmpxchg8b 3y agoI was in LDAC from 2007-2010 and was told that all machines could remote boot to join the renderfarm if required, but I never actually saw it in action. Lucasfilm never picked good CTOs. While I was there they picked someone from Apple who seemed to be more about marketing than anything else..
- samstave 3y agoIt was a money war.... CFO won.
- samstave 3y agoHere is some of the custome tray I designed. https://i.imgur.com/MOzeEBu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/MOzeEBu.jpg Thats from the LDAC DC (You couldnt buy those parts at that time - I had to design them, (super FN obvious FN parts... right) - so I designed them and they later became parametric... but the 90's and well into the 2000's CAD was stagnant. and lame. Then Autodesk took Acid and reall saw what the F was going on... - Whats funny, is that I had to design this by hand, in ORTHO - and do the ISO also by hand in AutoCAD... This and a many other tray objects in that data center. (I did the layout for all the servers hosting Starwars Online) --- Anyway - after many a year doing datacenter design - there are folks at places like FB, Goog, AWS, and they just draw a layout like anyone would Sim City - and connect required resources etc...
- rini17 3y agoBiggest obstacle would probably be the 2/3rds of power which ends up as waste heat before it even enters the workstation :)
- Vicinity9635 3y ago[dead]
- samstave 3y agoedit. I meant both Data Center & Direct Current.. fork them it at your will