Stuttering?

Anyway, follow the Moon... What if it is new moon? :-P

I guess "follow the darkness" wouldn't sound as appealing to a company that "does no evil" (sic), eh?

welcome our air cooled, load shifting, global overlords.

""And while each one can be energy efficient, you now need two of them."

That's a strawman argument as I believe Google is now closer to 50 datacenters, not two. If you have 50 datacenters, and by eliminating chillers you now make them 50% more efficient, then by adding an additional datacenter for load shedding you are now merely 49% more efficient.

Methinks you just opened you mouth and let random nonsense fall out of your brain. Read the rest of the quote:

"..and enterprise services and all sorts of services,"

Don't be a tool.

We're so great, the human race. One day there will be 2 maybe 3 companies, with hundreds of datacenters, thousands, nay millions of servers constantly....searching the other company's servers for information until all we have is three sources of info, all indexed by the other two!

Then we will really prove how great mankind realy is!

"These infrastructures that we run - and that Google does too - are so large, you can't really rely on individuals to manually make these decisions on an application failing-over from one [data center] site to another. Essentially, it all has to be built into automation software that makes these types of decisions."

Where's the skynet icon?

"like hundreds of thousands of variable linear programming problems that need to run in quasi-real-time"

The what with the what now?

IYAYCDC, is that some sort of Monty Python-esque insult, what's next "I wave my mouse's ball at you"

Turning your system off is indeed a great way to avoid overheating problems. This could be tech supports new answer to everything, its certainly more likely to work than upgrading the drivers.

"These infrastructures that we run - and that Google does too - are so large, you can't really rely on individuals to manually make these decisions on an application failing-over from one [data center] site to another. Essentially, it all has to be built into automation software that makes these types of decisions."

Were you using all that to store T-Mobile Sidekick customers' data?

Didn't think so....

but the difference is, Google's works.

Clippy: "I see you're trying to failover your mission-critical application, would you like me to:

a) transfer it to the most suitable data centre, but not tell you which one so you never find it again;

b) spend so much time trying to decide which data centre is best that a fire starts in this data centre;

c) just kill the application now, to save you time later?"

@J 3 - you said it first, but I'll add that "cloud evangelist" must be a new euphemism for idiot.

A digital thermometer in every data centre can report to every font-end load balancer and it's a pretty easy task to spot those where temperatures are rising and direct traffic to those which are not, even tell those data centres you're no longer directing data towards to power-down for a while.

Okay, the algorithms may be fancy to make it optimal, but I don't really see this as anything "magical" or "mysterious". Indeed, it could perhaps be simply implemented by telling the load-balancers that heat build-up is extra load and they'll automatically choose least-loaded / cooler back-end handlers.

Lightweight coolers can be installed for the cases where local ambient temperatures or total workloads rise or where there's a delay in load-balancing being effective.

Seems all very pedestrian to me. Maybe I'm not understanding what all the fuss is about.

Mine's the one with the "Acme HVAC Services" logo.

"If you're offloading data like that, essentially that would mean you would have to have a second data center with the same infrastructure somewhere else," he says. "And while each one can be energy efficient, you now need two of them. So the net is actually energy inefficient. You need a lot more infrastructure."

Will say this is actually a good argument for the efficiency crowd. Not to mention the cost of multiple data centers. Also the question being raised about the links being cut. What happens then? Does Google mysteriously load shed to the cloud? Oh wait. . .FAIL

Great concepts on both ends but in all honesty I think M$ is actually onto something here

Ahgr, what a dreadful antivocabulification.

And as for possible "obviously stupid" solutions by two of the largest data corporations in the world: however badly they may or may not have phrased it for the general public, don't you think you're quite an idiot if you argue either way in comments from your lazy chair, having none of the facs at hand? What with famous secrecy ("chocolate factory", umpa-lumpas and all that) and so forth?