Florida Town Builds Data Center In Water Tank 104
miller60 writes "The Florida town of Altamonte Springs has converted an old water storage tank into a new data center. The decommissioned tank previously held up to 770,000 gallons of water, but its 18-inch-thick walls provided a hurricane-proof home for the town's IT gear, which had to be relocated three times in 2004 to ride out major storms. The Altamonte Springs facility is the latest example of data centers in strange places, including chapels, shopping malls, cargo ships, old particle accelerators and caves."
Re:Lightning (Score:2, Informative)
Not all water tanks are metal. Plus, this is not a water TOWER. It's a water tank that sits on the ground. You didn't even have to RTFA, just had to look at the picture.
Re:And it's great for sysadmins (Score:3, Informative)
The energy costs etc. of keeping it pure enough to not conduct would far exceed the energy costs of sufficient AC.
Take 10inches off those walls (Score:5, Informative)
Summary is inaccurate (as usual):
TFS: 18-inch walls
TFA: 8-inch walls
Re:in my pocket, on my droid (Score:3, Informative)
...is more compute power, memory and disk than the Cray-2 I did my dissertation work on.
yes yes, but could you actually do your dissertation work on your droid today?
<rant>
I have heard many people claim things like, "my wristwatch has more power than a supercomputer in the 60's that took up an entire floor of the building". The next question to ask is, what did that computer that took so much space do? The response is something along the lines of, "it ran the payroll for 190k employees." I then ask if their wristwatch can run the payroll for 190k employees. Then it dawns on them that the old systems of yesteryear weren't quite so simple and trivial.
</rant>
Re:And it's great for sysadmins (Score:2, Informative)
You could use Fluorinert and avoid having to deal with purity, but that would still far exceed the cost given the one time I got a price on it...
Apparently, it's sold more widely now, so at $40 per 5 mL, to fill the 770,000 gallons... $23,318,136,600
(Probably cheaper in bulk) I wonder about Google going to this someday.