Rather than in May, we have our Bike-to-Work Day when the weather is better.
Today, out of 34 employees, we had 13 bike to work! We hosted a custom-made omelet or blueberry pancake breakfast (made by one of the riders who got here at 5:30am for prep). Here’s the documentary photo!
Left-to-right: Brent Holder, Travis Ogdon, Susan Douglas-Fox, Kathy Zak (chef), Sarah Wetmore (first timer), Lorraine Bessmer, Rich Bader (CEO), Jeff Burlingame, John Beaston, Mikayla Dickinson (first timer), Steve Knipple, Jack Flug and Eric Bourassa.
It’s interesting how barnyard animals have been written up in conjunction with data centers lately – embracing the “farm” in “server farm.”
Ten thousand cows, for example, and the resulting bi-product of their collective digestive systems, “could fulfill the power requirements of a 1-megawatt (MW) data center — the equivalent of a medium-sized data center — with power left over to support other needs on the farm.” This observation is from HP Labs in a research paper presented at the recent ASME International Conference on Energy and Sustainability.
Apparently, the heat generated by said data center can aid the anaerobic digestion of animal waste, which results in the production of methane that can be used to generate power for the data center. “This symbiotic relationship allows the waste problems faced by dairy farms and the energy demands of the modern data center to be addressed in a sustainable manner,” says HP. (I’m just hoping you don’t end up with a server farm that smells like a dairy farm.) Click here to read more about this dairy/server farm scenario.
Goats are the topic at the Yahoo! data center in Quincy, Washington. Twice a year a herd of 252 goats takes care of the invasive weeds (probably blackberries) that threaten to take over the pasture beside the facility. (Nothing was mentioned in this article about the resulting bi-product of their collective digestive systems.)
With a moo, moo here… a baa, baa there…
Last week EasyStreet celebrated our 15 years in business with a French-themed celebration. Our executive team dressed up as famous French icons. Only one pair of legs in the above photo belongs to a member of the female gender. Can you guess which one? (Yes, EasyStreeters REALLY know how to party!)
Brian Ghidinelli uses a stack of old Linux servers as an end table.
I’ve never watched it, but there’s a show on A&E called “Hoarders” about the lives of individuals whose inability to part with to part with their belongings (read, “garbage”) is “so out of control that they are on the verge of a personal crisis.”
This ITWorld article takes a peak at folks who are unable to part with their antiquated technical “stuff.”
One fellow mentioned in the article, an IT lawyer, defends his obsession with keeping old laptop computers “because they contain old electronic business records.” Uh huh. Most of the other hoarders confess to holding on to their ancient hardware “just in case…” Sounds geek to me.
At EasyStreet we don’t hoard old, worthless electronics, but we do have an assortment of — let’s say — “seasoned” servers available for lease by Managed Server customers whose applications don’t require the latest/greatest equipment. Give us a call if you’d like to find out more.
It’s time to knock wood. EasyStreet didn’t have an outage in 2009. And with all of our redundancies in place, we’re not likely to have one. (But I write this with 14 days left in the year — hence the “knock wood.”) This Data Center Knowledge roundup of major data center outages makes it clear it can happen to any organization — and for a variety of reasons. Even Michael Jackson “broke” the Interwebs. Enjoy!
