Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by scottlamb 38 days ago
Where is it a good option? I'd expect datacenters to be more focused on efficiency, not less.
2 comments
felixgallo 38 days ago
Music, medical, engineering. Wherever the waveform consistency and noise floor are the optimization point.
link
rdbl27 38 days ago
Datacenters are focused on "never letting the equipment go down for any reason."

If they can do that efficiently, that's great.

If they have to choose between efficiency and outage risk, they always drop efficiency. That's why they use exclusively online UPS.

link
scottlamb 38 days ago
> Datacenters are focused on "never letting the equipment go down for any reason."

Disagree. I'm most familiar with Google. For a long time at least their UPSs were built in to each machine and not super reliable. They built entire datacenters without cooling with the understanding that for a few days a year it may be too hot for human access. The reliability is from failing over to other equipment—machine, cluster, even region.

Small/on-prem/co-location datacenters may make totally different choices, but I think the major cloud/AI providers would be similar to Google in this respect.

The sibling comment about other industries was enlightening to me though.

link