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Steelcase Pyramid to become $5Billion Switch Data Center


GRDadof3

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  • 1 month later...
4 hours ago, walker said:

First set of modular air handlers (the red boxes) have been installed:

switch 2017-02-16.JPG

As a reminder, here's one of the renderings that shows where the rest of them go:

switch-pyramid modular air handlers.jpg

 

 

People traveling through the area on M-6 are gonna say "Oh my word Henry! What in the world is THAT!!!!" "Is it a spaceship??!!"

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This is stuff of conspiracies. Just think about it: pyramid, mass data collection, the all knowing eye. Warehouses, no.... they went with a pyramid... who's at the round table of buildigerberg? Switch? I'm telling you, the pyramid was CHOOSEN, choosen for a reason! We are "switch"-ing to a NWO.

 

Lol, I make my self laugh sometimes... I'm 110% sure every loony conspiracy will involve this building when people hear about it. If google did such a bold thing as to choose a pyramid for a data center, just think of the PR that would result. Switch did not do itself any favors, but I don't think people care, at least for now. I'm just thinking in the future, if our political climate changes more towards authoritarianism, which it could, I'm thinking this decision to put a data center in a pyramid was a long term, bad decision. But IDK. At least for now it will be the coolest looking data center. 

 

Oh, and by the way, I just found an interesting video, the other day, that might have an influence over the future of data centers. 

 

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13 hours ago, temporary.name said:

I'm getting the impression you don't quite know how blockchains work.

In short, they're a set of "transactions." Be it a cat picture, Bitcoin, or online gambling like Ethereum wants. The blockchain is a record of all those transactions (growing is size accordingly). Those who "mine" Bitcoin (or mine ether) are essentially verifying every single one of those transactions. They are very much needed to keep this type of distributed computing going. They ARE the platform. Those verifications are what Ethereum are talking about in that video when they say the platform is "trustworthy."

You're correct in that Bitcoin is limited in supply but the amount of transactions that can be done with it in an amount of time are not. The same is true for Ethereum with one very big difference; the "bitcoins" (ether) are not limited. 

Unlimited ether plus unlimited transactions makes for a very large electricity bill to get together enough computing power to verify an unlimited blockchain. 

Let me ask you this; are you willing to let your home computer run 24/7 at 100% CPU usage to participate in Ethereum in, say, five years?

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Thanks for enlightening me on the subject. It is true, I do not know how blockchains work. But wouldn't you agree that's just an engineering problem?  Before spaceships, before planes, before cars, before the light bulb, before all of this, there were naysayers, mocking people working on engineering solutions that created something that did not exist before. Their catalyst was on the belief of a different future, not one based upon the present reality. Because we send cat pictures on mobile computers faster than what was available during the Apollo program, doesn't speak to the absurdity of Etherium, it' speaks to its validity. Present limits create future solutions. While I can't predict the future, I can predict the inevitable. And if you think the productive capability of our present technology is the limiting factor of these ideas, then you presuppose against the notion that change is inevitable. My notion is that there are ARE paralleling engineers working on alternative computational platform structures. I think your argument stands on skeletons of histories past naysayers. Those who say it's hard to light a room more than what a candle is capable of. You may work on Ideas which presupposes an alternative reality. Those who do, stand most to gain when such change is realized. 

 

Edited by crinzema
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  • 3 weeks later...
6 hours ago, temporary.name said:

10gbps for $950/month.

 

Hmm... You think they have a shower there?

Yes, they have some kind of disaster recovery area with beds and showers. 

1 hour ago, arcturus said:

Thanks for sharing the non-essential WoodTV article. 

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10 hours ago, joeDowntown said:

In the video there are red "pipes" running up the sides of the pyramid. It looks pretty cool. Are those in the plans? Would they be functional or decorative?

Joe

I think they're just for aesthetics. Another excuse to use the color red. 

In the video they talk about how fast data can travel to Ashburn, Virginia. It's apparently the colocation data center capitol of the U.S.:

http://www.coloadvisor.com/blog/ashburn-data-centers-choices/

They talk about it in the video because Grand Rapids makes a good choice site for a redundant system, if you're renting space in Ashburn, VA at Equinix or Digital Realty (or if you're Amazon, Bank of America or another large financial institution).

Some other things to note, one of the reasons it's believed that they looked inland from the East Coast is because of the large hurricanes that have hit there in the last 5 years. Hurricane Sandy put a lot of lower Manhattan infrastructure underwater. 

They have Supernap Grand Rapids on their website now. Here's the square footage breakdown:

58c2a6b36bcd6_SupernapGrandRapidsBreakdown.thumb.JPG.c0eee7e0c872e7578b05cf2b33979704.JPG

 

 

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So, we considered moving one of our DR sites to Switch early last fall.  We toured the facility and didn't think the pyramid would be ready in time for us (Late 2016).  We also got the impression that the pyramid building was taking a lot of new engineering since it wasn't purpose built for a data center (with the exception of the space Steelcase had used).   They were building out racks in a very high ceiling room with lots of windows...

They also did a lot of things "for show".  An example is that they had wallpaper that made it look like walls were re-inforced concrete.  The security guards looked like they were ready for a gun fight (think SWAT team) which in the cybersecurity world is not the biggest vulnerability...

Our needs for this co-location data center was small (3-4 racks)  and we got the impression they really were focused on the very large customers like Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. and not focused on smaller clients (ie. their response to our questions was very delayed or nonexistent.  

We will definitely reconsider them once they have their purpose built buildings done (and our contracts with other colocation providers are up for renewal).  I did like the fact they had lots of workspace recovery options and I think this could be a real cool spot for an office if you were a cloud company.

Edited by Sparty97
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