Datacenter Innovation from DreamHost

April 1, 2010 on 1:22 pm | In Business, Funnyish, Hardware, Insider View, New Features, Updates by Brett | 35 Comments

Today we’re revealing some never-before seen photos of some of the darkened corners of our datacenters.

It’s not something we’re proud of, but we intend to do something about it.

You network admins know how it is. Sometimes a server dies and it’s just easier to leave it there and reuse its network cable without rerouting everything. And sometimes it’s just too hard to put a new cable in the channel where it belongs so you end up draping it over the top of everything. It’s easy, it works, and your customers never need to know about it.

Before you know it your hardware is buried in a sea of cables and has become physically unreachable.

Let’s face it. Datacenters are kind of boring. The only major cosmetic change they’ve gotten over the past twenty years has been the size of the computers sitting in them. And maybe the colors of the cables running through them.

We’ve today announced a new initiative : Wireless Datacenters.

At our Los Angeles datacenter we’ve replaced literally thousands of miles of cat5, cat6, and fiber with a large supply of 802.11n USB wireless dongles. Everywhere you look you’ll find dongles dangling everywhere. Dangling dongles. (Internally this project was codenamed “Dang Dongs“.)

We’ve donated all of our old cabling to a local recycler, and the amount of clutter we’ve eliminated in our datacenter is phenomenal. You can now walk through the entire facility without tripping or fear of passing under a cable avalanche.

We’ve also reduced our carbon footprint by a huge amount. Do you have any idea how many trees it takes to make a 6 foot ethernet cable? Probably not very many…but still. Having less stuff generally means you’ve used fewer resources to make that stuff. It’s really a win-win all around.

Ethernet entanglements are now a thing of the past. 802.11n wireless is the future, and the future is now.

In fact it says right here on the box from Linksys that the new router we bought will “stream stored music to devices around your home” – no small feat. Imagine how fast it’ll serve your websites. Should be pretty great.

You can expect a white paper and some more photos of the new deployment soon.

35 Responses to “Datacenter Innovation from DreamHost”

  1. Aaron Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:24 pm

    Nice…

  2. Andy Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:25 pm

    Haha

  3. codewithdesign Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:25 pm

    Oh hey, I think I saw where my website is hosted.
    This is very cool!

  4. Nima Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:26 pm

    Brilliant!

  5. Shashi Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:28 pm

    Hurr, April Fools eh?

  6. Clifton Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:30 pm

    LOL! That’s a good one. Happy April 1st.

    If you really had that many wireless dongles emitting radiation, you could fry eggs in mid-air. :)

  7. Anurag Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:32 pm

    haha funny!

    Next joke I am expecting is – serious headache due to radio of 802.11 :P

    beware DH team :P

  8. Q Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:41 pm

    Now to drive by the datacenter and get free wifi! Thanks dreamhost ;)

  9. Logan Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:46 pm

    Wow! Quite an upgrade guys! ;)

  10. yonkeltron Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:53 pm

    What a great idea! Have you measured throughput? How many KB/second?

  11. John Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:57 pm

    But it won’t affect to the network performance, right?

  12. Andrew Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 1:57 pm

    haha awesome! :D

  13. Warll Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 2:15 pm

    I am looking forward to the white paper.

  14. Glen Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 2:35 pm

    @Warll I’m pretty sure it’s just going to be a “white paper”, I hope it’s a nice cotton blend.

  15. phoenix Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 3:06 pm

    Well played. Well played.

  16. sjafri Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 5:35 pm

    The best april fools joke so far lol

  17. Binoy xavier Says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 11:21 pm

    WOW! Nice setup guys :)

  18. Miles Says:
    April 2nd, 2010 at 6:46 am

    I’m all for streamlining and less clutter.

    And about being able to “stream stored music to devices around your home”… nothing like music beaming straight to your head hahahaha.

  19. Anthony P. Says:
    April 2nd, 2010 at 11:42 am

    I admit, I was had. I had about a half-page rant prepared on the inefficiencies of 802.11 and wireless MAC protocols vs 802.3

    Good one guys!

  20. Nelson Says:
    April 2nd, 2010 at 11:41 pm

    I got caught. I was telling my wife that this was going to make things a lot better. I started to ask her if we could do that here in our data center.

    Man the look on her face when she realized that i was serious.

    What a fool I am… At one point I did stop and asked myself “why would DreamHost use Dlink home routers when there are much much better routers on the market?”

    Good one DH, Good one.

  21. Andre Kinadi Says:
    April 3rd, 2010 at 4:14 am

    Hohoho, very funny…. I’m curious how they managed their datacenter? hahaha
    Nice job….

  22. Mezz Says:
    April 3rd, 2010 at 10:59 am

    MORE PHOTOS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  23. silent Says:
    April 3rd, 2010 at 8:41 pm

    I SEE CABLES THERE! BEHIND THOSE BLADES! :))

  24. Tom Gray Says:
    April 4th, 2010 at 4:01 pm

    Now that boys, is quite sick..

    What a load of trouble if your wireless drops though egh?

  25. Berkut Says:
    April 4th, 2010 at 9:41 pm

    As a IT vet, I can say that this is one of the best April fools jokes ever! LOL Well done guys! :) Wireless… Hahahaha! :) I love the pic with yellow cat5 too!!!

  26. Offshore web developer Says:
    April 6th, 2010 at 4:43 am

    This is very cool!
    Now to drive by the datacenter and get free wifi!

  27. Eric Says:
    April 6th, 2010 at 1:00 pm

    Hm….
    How would a datacenter change a Gigabit network (1GBs) to a Wireless N network (300MBs)?
    Joke…

  28. David Weedmark Says:
    April 6th, 2010 at 1:26 pm

    Thanks for the memories. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a room anything like this. Being one who has been tweeting @dreamhost daily since January (w/o reply, I might add ;-), I was actually looking for the news on your twitter iPad contest… Have you guys checked your mailbox lately? iPads went live last Saturday….

  29. KidHack Says:
    April 6th, 2010 at 6:32 pm

    sorry, but a dangling Dongle is technically a Dingle. get your terminology straight.

  30. maotoo Says:
    April 8th, 2010 at 8:11 am

    I think the transmission speed not very good

  31. bluecuke Says:
    April 8th, 2010 at 9:17 pm

    cable avalanche is controversial, lol

  32. Stop Snoring Tips Says:
    April 9th, 2010 at 11:29 am

    I do not think it is a good idea

  33. kestasjk Says:
    April 9th, 2010 at 7:36 pm

    Hahah it actually took me a moment to realize. “Hmm, that seems reasonab– wait.. ahhhh haha”

  34. Leo Bulero Says:
    April 29th, 2010 at 4:06 pm

    jokes aside that is probably the wave of the future in one way or another – cables are so 20th century.

  35. Taryn Jimerez Says:
    May 3rd, 2010 at 8:41 pm

    Hey, It’s nice to stumble upon a good website like this one. Do you mind if I use some of the info here, and I’ll put a link back to your site?

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