Bill Larry’s foot hovered in the air, while he waited to take a step forward. The data center dropped down. Then it lurched up. Bill waited for a moment more, judged the motion, and then leaped. The data center retreated from him at the last second, but he made the jump onto the adjoining floating barge.
Bill took a happy breath of ocean air, and felt the barge rock under him. This was his project, his mark on Avogadro. After starting out as an IT system administrator, his skills with people led him into management. After he got his MBA, he took a program management position with Avogadro in their data center facilities organization. Now in his early forties, he found himself riding helicopters to visit the modern pinnacle of high tech data centers: the offshore floating data center.
In the last decade, Avogadro invested in offshore power generation R&D. That investment had paid off with efficient electricity generation. Avogadro’s Portland Wave Converters, or PWC, were powered by oceanic waves. The waves never got tired, never ran out, and never needed fuel, so it was a very lucrative proposition once the wave generators were built. Gazing off to either side of him, Bill could see the PWC stretching out, a long line of white floats on the surface of the water, anchored to the sea bed below.
After developing the generation capacity, Avogadro engineers recognized that if electricity was generated offshore, it made sense to put the data centers offshore as well. Ocean real estate was effectively free. Cooling the thousands of servers located within a small space was tricky and expensive on land, but easy in the ocean, where cool ambient temperature sea water made for very effective computer cooling. Now Avogadro had an entire business unit devoted to utilizing the potential of these novel offshore data centers. Avogadro worked to refine the design, with plans to use the offshore data centers existing for their own operations, and lease cloud computing capacity to commercial customers.
Directly in front of Bill, the primary floating barge held what appear to be sixteen standard shipping containers. They had in fact originated as standard shipping containers, but Bill’s team had added a thick layer of weather proofing to protect the sensitive electronics contained within.
Of course, these floating data centers had a few problems that got Bill up in the middle of the night. Resiliency to storms was one big issue. But the weather had been clear last night, so that wasn’t the reason Bill was here this morning to inspect Prototype Offshore Data Center, or ODC, #4. Located 12 miles out from the California coast, ODC #4 was identical to ODC 1 through 3. A quarter mile line of Portland Wave Converters generating 25 megawatts of electricity, divided in the center by two large floating barges.
The barge behind Bill was surplus, serving simply as a helicopter landing pad. It wasn’t part of Bill’s original design, which had assumed that maintenance would come by boat. Then again, Bill hadn’t realized how many maintenance trips they would end up needing to make to the prototypes.
Avogadro had ruggedized the containers, communication equipment, and power generation equipment to the maximum feasible level, and they should have required barely any maintenance at all, even out here in the corrosive salt water environment. In fact, the entire system was designed to require only a single maintenance visit each year to replace servers. Unfortunately, the entirety of ODC #4 went offline the previous night at 4:06am. That’s what required this early morning visit. Bill and his team flew out from the company’s land-based Bay Area site as soon as the sun rose.
As Bill stepped closer to the cargo containers, he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach, and it wasn’t caused by the rolling and pitching motion of the barge. He saw burn marks on the side of the containers that could only have been caused by one thing: a welding torch. Bill shook his head in dismay. No hand-held welding torch should ever have touched these specially treated containers.
A closer inspection confirmed his fears. Bill saw a ragged hole cut into the side of the container. After the first theft three months ago, the cargo container doors had been hardened against possible thievery attempts, but the sides had no special treatment apart from the additional weather proofing.
While the other members of the team worked on opening the doors, Bill stuck his head in the container through the hole, and pointed his flashlight around. The racks that should have held hundreds of high performance computer servers were mostly empty, wires dangling everywhere, and various bits of low-value electronic equipment haphazardly strewn about.
Bill took out his Avogadro phone from his overalls to send a message to the email distribution list for the rest of the Offshore Data Center team. It would take more than a small maintenance team to fix ODC #4. The organization would need to kick into high gear to ship out new containers and servers.
Bill wanted to bang his head against the wall in frustration. The ODCs were located about ten miles offshore. Between the distance, and the lack of facilities for people, it was impossible for them to station anyone on board twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Besides, anyone stationed on board would be at risk from pirates. Bill knew that he and Jake Riley, the ODC Lead Manager, would be meeting with senior company management later that week to address the piracy issue. The entire ODC rollout plan was on hold pending a resolution. It didn’t bode well for Bill’s chance of getting a bonus or a raise.
It was a damn tough problem. A full floating data center could contain almost eighty-thousand servers along with their requisite hard drives, power supplies, emergency backup batteries, and communications equipment. Although none of the prototype floating data centers had been at full capacity yet, they still had about twenty- thousand servers onboard worth close to ten million dollars. That was a substantial target. Worse, it wasn’t clear yet whether the target truly was the computer equipment or whether it was the potential customer data on the server hard drives.
When Bill saw the destruction the pirates caused and reflected on the amount of work it was going to generate, even he could see the sense in Jake’s controversial proposal to give the ODCs deterrents that would prevent pirates from boarding them. That didn’t stop a chill from running through him when he thought about autonomous robots with guns being stationed on board the data center.
“Hi Mike, what a surprise!” Christine smiled at Mike, then hugged him warmly. “David didn’t mention you were coming over for dinner. Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll let David know you’re here.”
She tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear, and turned to walk upstairs to fetch David.
Mike admired Christine as she walked up the stairs, and then turned to look around at the house while he waited. Lucky David. The early twentieth century home was an American Four Square: a classic, stylish, and desirable Portland house. The Four Square, so called because each of the four outside walls was a near perfect square, was larger than Mike’s own bungalow. On the other hand, like many other Portland Four Squares, David and Christine’s house had been extended by the previous owners to include a large family room on the main level. As a result, and because of David and Christine’s tastes, their interior was now a mixture of modern design and pure geek. Ikea furniture was interspersed with computers, and dominated by a high end gaming system in one room. Mike looked on admiringly. He tried, but his own place just looked like his college apartment.
Mike gazed at a photo of David and Christine on the mantel. Single and lacking family in town, it wasn’t unusual for Mike to drop in for dinner with Christine and David, especially when he was between girlfriends. Of course, he usually didn’t drop in unannounced, but he had a pressing reason to talk to David tonight. Mike had figured out just that afternoon what was going on with ELOPe. He now understood the unexplained activity in the ELOPe system, and the unexpected and unlikely allocation of dedicated servers. It even explained David’s strange behavior in the office when David announced that they had been granted additional servers. His hands were sweaty at the thought of confronting David. It was the first time that he’d ever known David to be less than totally honest with him.
Mike snapped out of his reverie at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. David clasped Mike on the shoulder warmly, and led him into the kitchen, with Christine following them.
“Vodka martinis everyone?” Christine suggested, following their long standing tradition.
“Sounds great,” Mike and David answered simultaneously. They smiled at each other. For a moment, Mike felt the strong camaraderie he had shared for years now with David.
Mike and David sat in bar stools on the opposite side of the counter from Christine. Christine grabbed a bottle of Stolichnaya and glasses.
“It’s good to see you,” David said, still smiling.
Mike swallowed. It was harder to confront David now that he was back to being himself. It would have been easier if David was still distracted and vague.
“So why the unexpected visit?” David asked.
