YOLO wrote: ↑Tue Jun 20, 2023 3:31 pm
Loudoun county green lit a bunch of datacenters around the Loudoun Gateway station IIRC. The thought here is that IT workers flying in can take metro to get to their cages without having to rent a car or something like that. A little far fetched IMO and not the best use of space but it is what it is...
I'm going to throw a wrench in that idea later on, but let me describe the train wreck first.
My day job has data centers in Ashburn. To get to them by transit, you can go all the way out to Ashburn and then take a Silver Line rush-hour bus to within walking distance... but going back to the station, you have to walk across two six-lane parkways to get to a bus stop in front of a Home Depot
OR transfer to the right direction.
It's 1h36m to get there from BWI Airport. If I take transit from MARC, it's 4h. If I have equipment, it's worth driving.
But then, here's the wrench: My day job offers "remote hands" in which technicians that the job provides will receive from UPS/FedEx/etc, rack, connect, and power on the server. Those techs are on hand 24/7. What is to say some company who has a rack or ten in our data center has already configured their firewall to accept a server they've already shipped, and they just need it racked, plugged in, and turned on? Some *big* companies?
That was employed heavily by said companies during the pandemic, and I bet they're still opting for that in most cases.
...which blows the "Tech by transit" idea out of the water.
Nice idea, but not only poorly executed, is kinda unneeded.