As seen is recent expo in Orlando, this modular concept had no containers required...only a few thousand legos!!! Check out the full story by Robert McMillan, Wired Enterprise, complete with pictures.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/lego-data-center/
Eduardo Tanaka built this lifelike 7,000-piece data center in about 12 hours. It took four hours of planning, and eight hours of building fun. All photos: Eduardo Tanaka
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/lego-data-center/
Can’t Match Apple’s $1B Data Center Budget? Use Legos
Eduardo Tanaka built this lifelike 7,000-piece data center in about 12 hours. It took four hours of planning, and eight hours of building fun. All photos: Eduardo Tanaka
This week, Apple said it was planning to shell out another $1 billion to build a state-of-the art data center in Reno, Nevada. Building data centers is becoming the new sport of internet kings,
something that giants like Amazon and Google and Microsoft need to do to maintain their competitive edge.
something that giants like Amazon and Google and Microsoft need to do to maintain their competitive edge.
But it seems like a few regular folks are getting a taste of data-center-construction thrill ride, lining up racks of servers, assembling generators and control rooms, and even fork-lifting modular data centers into place.
They do it all in Legoland.
Eduardo Tanaka is one of those people. He’s a 42-year-old regional manager for data center management software company Rit Technologies, based in São Paulo, Brazil. A lifelong Lego fan, he decided to build his own recently. After looking around for data center kits, he decided to design his own fantasy data center, using Lego Digital Designer, a computer-aided design tool that helps you figure out if you have all the parts you need.
Eduardo Tanaka is one of those people. He’s a 42-year-old regional manager for data center management software company Rit Technologies, based in São Paulo, Brazil. A lifelong Lego fan, he decided to build his own recently. After looking around for data center kits, he decided to design his own fantasy data center, using Lego Digital Designer, a computer-aided design tool that helps you figure out if you have all the parts you need.
His 7,000-piece data center includes racks and racks of blade servers, his-and-hers bathrooms, an emergency generator, and even bike parking in front (see photos above). To make the data center more lifelike, Tanaka grabbed images of real-life equipment from the internet, printed them onto labels, and then stuck them to his Legos.
Tanaka says his favorite room is a nondescript office on the side of the building. “There is a small room with one guy working and he has a laptop,” he says. “That’s supposed to be me.”
Tanaka says his favorite room is a nondescript office on the side of the building. “There is a small room with one guy working and he has a laptop,” he says. “That’s supposed to be me.”
But his data center is a work in process. He’s now working on a security detail — they hide behind a hidden door and pop up whenever there’s an alarm — as well as magnetic door sensors. “I am trying to see if I can get a hold of some temperature sensors to place in the main rooms as well as a infrared presence sensor to place in a corridor,” he adds.
He’s not the only person building Lego data centers. There was a pretty elaborate Lego data center on display at Microsoft’s TechEd conference in Orlando, Florida, earlier this month, and if you troll around YouTube, you can find a few stop-motion featurettes, including this rather straightforward piece, and this more suspenseful film of a modular datacenter being rolled into place to bail out a company in crisis.
You can download the plans for Tanaka’s data center by searching for “data center” on Lego’s Digital Design webpage.
Robert McMillan is a writer with Wired Enterprise. Got a tip? Send him an email at: [email protected].
Follow @bobmcmillan on Twitter.
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