email.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for coming over tonight. I’m glad we talked.
But we need to meet early tomorrow morning. There’s something I didn’t tell you about ELOPe. We need to live-patch the production internal email systems to remove a part of ELOPe. You’re the only one with the experience to do it. I’ll tell you the details tomorrow morning. — David.
David relaxed as he hit the send button. With Mike by his side, they could fix anything.
Jake Riley, graying around the temples, but dressed sharply, put up a photo of the data center breaking. He was tired, having worked a twelve hour day, but he forced himself to keep his energy high for the presentation. They were lucky to get this meeting with the executive team, even if it was scheduled for 9:30 pm. “This morning Bill flew out to Offshore Data Center #4, off the San Francisco coast. Pirates used welding equipment to cut holes in the sides of six of the cargo containers onboard ODC #4, and removed the servers from those containers. The server racks and power transformers were left behind, but they were effectively destroyed.” He switched to an interior photo showing the pillaged container.
Jake paused to look around at everyone in the virtual conference room. “That brings us to three pirate attacks in as many months. Two on the West coast, one on the East coast.”
Jake Riley was the Lead Manager of the Offshore Data Center project. With the help of Bill, they were briefing Kenneth Harrison and CEO Rebecca Smith on the piracy problem. The issue had caused a hold up in the ODC rollouts and therefore caused a small but growing hiccup in the Avogadro’s master data center rollout plan. Server capacity requirements doubled every thirty months at Avogadro, and were expected to continue to grow at that rate. That they were meeting at 9:30 at night was a sure sign of just how critical server capacity was to the company’s growth.
“Tell us about hardening the units. You already do some hardening, right? Is there anything more you can do?”
This question came from Kenneth Harrison. Kenneth and Rebecca Smith were located in the Oregon virtual conference room, while Jake and Bill Larry were in the Palo Alto virtual conference room. Each room included high fidelity, directional microphones and speakers, high definition video screens and cameras, and all the processing power to link them up. All together the technology created an immersive simulation of a single conference room. To Jake and Bill, it felt like Kenneth and Rebecca were sitting across the conference table from them, instead of seven hundred miles away. Jake got a kick out of using the virtual conference rooms. He thought the conference rooms were the closest to a Star Trek holodeck he’d experience in his lifetime.
Jake could see Rebecca Smith scanning through the photos of the attack, a frown on her face. “The units are ruggedized for the maritime environment. In fact, a standard cargo container is watertight, and more than capable of floating for years on its own. Our container boxes are of course modified to allow electricity, cooling, and data in and out. But we also apply an additional weatherization layer to control humidity, and ensure optimum interior conditions given the corrosive nature of the salt water environment. After the first pirate theft, we modified the design and installed high security doors on the units in production, and retrofitted those doors to the existing containers,” Jake explained. While he spoke, he switched the overhead screen to a slide showing an exploded diagram of the container design.
Jake hated bad news presentations. He liked to be the guy who had only good news to report when he met with the executives. When he first heard about the offshore data center project, he knew it would be wrought with technical challenges, but he was comfortable with those. He knew that he’d have to bring on new employees with specialties in maritime engineering and construction, people who would clash with the culture of Avogadro, and that might present people management challenges, but he was comfortable with that too. He never expected that old- fashioned piracy would be his biggest challenge. Well, not quite old-fashioned, these had blowtorches after all. Pirates, damn it. He shook his head subtly at the thought, and went on.
“No matter what we do, there will always be a weakest link in security. The weakest link with ODC #4 was the container walls. Even if we harden those, there will be another weakest link. Hell, they could tow the whole thing away if they had a mind to. The reality is that the units are sitting out there in the ocean, miles away from shore and any possible response. Even with effective monitoring, if we have to scramble a helicopter to fly out, we’re looking at a one hour response time. If we have to scramble a boat, it’s a two hour response time. Those times are only if we have people staffed and ready to respond twenty-four hours a day.”
“Monitoring is very difficult as well,” Bill said. “We can of course easily monitor the interior of the cargo containers, where the environment is controlled. However, the exterior is subject to heavy winds, rain, salt water. We’ve tried three different models of security cameras, and they’ve all failed. Instead of finding out when pirates board, we find out only when servers are unplugged.”
Rebecca broke in. “The roll out plan for data centers calls for twenty additional offshore data centers within the next six months. Those ODCs are intended to be spread around the world to meet capacity requirements. We don’t have the real estate to put them on land where they are needed. We can’t centralize them because of bandwidth and latency issues. The ODC project is critical, as you well know Jake,” Rebecca emphasized. “Tell me you’ve got a plan to get us back on track.”
“Well, I know this is going to sound controversial, at least initially, but we do have a proposal. I hope you’ll hear us out before you make a decision. Do you recall the piracy problem off the coast of Somalia?”
Jake saw nods from Rebecca and Kenneth across the virtual table, and then he continued. “You may know that iRobot, the company that makes Roomba, also makes robots for military use?” More nods. “Well, the companies that were shipping freight around Somalia couldn’t just arm their sailors. The sailors of course have no training in hand to hand combat, and couldn’t reasonably be expected to repel a pirate attack.”
Jake put another slide up on the overhead screen, showing a small tank-like robot. “iRobot already had weaponized land robots, and exploratory maritime robots. They took the next step, which was to develop weaponized versions of their maritime robots. They deployed the robots on the ships that needed to pass near Somalia. There were two parts to their solution. An automated submersible robot that can attack and disable the pirate ship itself, and an automated robot on the deck of the ship that can repel would-be boarders. They deployed the robots on dozens of commercial ships in the area, and after three successful cases of repelling pirate attacks, there have been no major attempts at piracy in the last six months.”
Jake looked up at the screen. Rebecca and Kenneth were glancing at each other, and Rebecca’s frown had grown. Jake forced himself to keep going. He switched slides again, showing the submersible robot, and then the submersible robot and tank-like robot onboard a freighter. “We talked to iRobot, and I have an initial bid from them. They have recommended a similar package for our offshore data centers. Submersible robots to disable ships, onboard robots to disable boarders.”
It was hard for Jake to look Kenneth and Rebecca in the eye. He knew that he was walking a fine line here. Avogadro prided itself on their open, sustainable, fair culture. It wasn’t exactly a culture that was welcoming to the idea of violence and guns. He could hardly believe he had suggested putting weapons in a data center. There wasn’t even a single armed guard in all the land-based facilities to the best of his knowledge. They were, after all, an internet company, not a military contractor.
Before Rebecca could respond, Bill jumped in. “I know this may seem radical to put armed robots in place. But look at the facts. First, it has worked off Somalia. Second, it will scale to any number of data centers we care to deploy. Third, it’s cost effective because we don’t have to maintain people on board the data centers.”
“Go on, we’ll hear you out,” Kenneth replied, waving his hand to tell them to keep the details coming.
Jake and Bill went on to cover the iRobot proposal in detail. Jake displayed slides, as he and Bill took turns explaining the types of robots that would be used, and the quote that iRobot had put together in response to their explanation of the problem they were facing. They spent the greatest amount of time explaining the protocols put in place with the robots to ensure minimum loss of life and risk.
At the end of the presentation everything was quiet. Jake could hear the hum of cooling fans in the room. He felt sweaty under his clothes. He desperately wanted to go home. He discreetly glanced at the clock on screen. It was after eleven now. He’d been working since five in the morning.
