> In the event of a power outage, one provider could only give us 30 seconds of emergency power—versus five minutes with a standard UPS setup—because they used an inertia wheel.
If a generator fails to start in 30 seconds, that almost always means it will also not start within 5 minutes.
Does dropbox have automation that attempts to gracefully shut down systems if a generator fails to start? Are systems then kept down until the battery UPS system is fully recharged? If not, the difference between 30 seconds and 5 minutes doesn’t seem important.
Our Indian Condo complex generator regularly takes more than 30 seconds to start up. Even the best case is likely at 10 seconds so only having such a small cushion sounds dangerous.
Some rough calculations on a fully loaded data center that I have worked on designing shows that you only have about a minute before the air gets to an overheating condition due to the low heat capacity. The HVAC doesn't keep running through a total power failure even if the computers have a lot of reserve power.
This is why the only real solution is to not have total local control of zoning.
Given the choice, many will vote to restrict what other people around them can do with their property to benefit their own interests - financial, quality of life, etc. While externalizing the costs (higher housing costs, pollution, etc) across a large number of people who aren't allowed a vote. Hoping people will do otherwise isn't going to get results.
But given that the zoning impacts have just as big an impact on the low-paid worker who has to commute hours to the local hospital to work, it is entirely reasonable to allow those impacted parties a vote by moving zoning away from total local control up to a larger level. Recent legislative steps in CA are a move in the right direction, but need to go much farther to create more meaningful changes.
Basically, if you want a quiet neighborhood with large plots of land, you should be required to bear the full cost of that, rather than voting to externalize the majority of those costs across the larger population.
FWIW, I am happy to pay a premium for the living situation I want. I do that today across high housing costs / taxes / cost of local goods/services. I'd happily support paying for other externalities (e.g. carbon taxes).
The premium would be really large though. The difference is only in degree between current zoning and something like "I have a nice view from my window and therefore my neighbors should not be allowed to build up the 2nd floor or plant trees in a way that would block it, and nobody should be allowed to build tall buildings in downtown between me and the mountains". The current zoning just happens to be status quo. Both unreasonably restrict what others can do with their property, and the only fair way to really "pay the premium" to enforce either is to buy the land (or at least, pay some large fraction of market rent, to offset the loss that owner incurs by not e.g. building and renting out more units). Well that or NIMBYism, which is a nicer name for regulatory capture, i.e. corruption.
Yes, this is what NIMBY means. "I am ok with more housing, just not by me."
The specifics will vary in every case, but in every case it will be some argument on why THIS is not the right place to build more housing. For every possible value of this. Areas that don't have extremely local control over zoning do a better job of combatting this.
Yes, the point is that Republicans violated the principles you are laying out here under the exact same situation. So violating this principle again in the exact same way would be the only non-hypocritical way to handle this situation.
More importantly, how do those cattle become cattle in the first place without BMC? How do you turn them into another breed of cattle without BMC?
Not that it can't be done... but that's a system dependent on the hardware doing the right thing, as opposed to a system that can tell the hardware what to do every step of the way.
How are you triggering the machine to PXE boot? How are you recovering from situations where the machine becomes unresponsive or needs someone to look at a console to see why a failure occurred?
Having the ability to remotely reboot servers is good, even in a “cattle” environment. Being able to pull temperature sensor data from servers is useful in a data center environment. Having an out of band console available can be helpful during incidents and outages, or with remote sites where there’s no tech that will be there. BMCs are useful in a large scale environment.
You must realise that potential 90 day downtimes just aren't acceptable in some domains.
Just because most BMC implementations are bug riddled shitshows, that does not mean the concept of a BMC is bad. OpenBMC is the exact right solution to the problem of bad BMC implementations.
Of course, you've signed up with that name just to issue decrees about IPMI being bad :)
I have high hopes for this area. There are a huge amount of ad-hoc problems that are today solved most easily by throwing together an Excel file, even for a very competent programmer. There is currently no faster way to manipulate and do small scale programming on data. For decision analysis and modeling, you go straight from excel to a full-blown program, without any other compelling options.
A product with some interesting ideas in this area is Calca: http://calca.io/
If a generator fails to start in 30 seconds, that almost always means it will also not start within 5 minutes.
Does dropbox have automation that attempts to gracefully shut down systems if a generator fails to start? Are systems then kept down until the battery UPS system is fully recharged? If not, the difference between 30 seconds and 5 minutes doesn’t seem important.