Local Company grabs world attention with new innovation - The Datapod

Now the rust report has an article on canberra companies – in an interview with the VP of APC australia.

http://www.rustreport.com.au/ – VIP told me section…

fisho,

the reason i mentioned seeing machines and CEA is that they are R&D companies who have managed to succeed despite the roadblocks that the ACT government seems to provide. Seeing machines was started as an ANU incubator company – how many other companies are out there from that program that we don’t know about? R&D has never been a high priority for the ACT governments of the day, there are so many small start up companies that are successful here, and mostly with little or no help from any govt agencies.

Perhaps the government or the opposition need to start formulating plans to encourage business here, not the large companies only, but all potential innovation R&D organisations. At least CSIRO produces some awesome go to market technologies, but i think that the federal Government has a better understanding of the future of R&D, and promotes a far better message that the ACT Government.

It’s big, it can’t be retrofitted to a building easily, thermal load and flow has been done to death by every vendor of IT equipment. It’s a standard part of server room design. Good luck slapping one in at short notice without exceeding the floor load rating. Or getting power. Or cooling towers. Never mind the myriad fibre converters available.

Perhaps useful in a disaster scenario as an air portable modular unit. If you have a Herc on standby at the runway.

In a disaster you need a location, power to run the place, cooling and space as well as the equipment. You are better off having a genny in the basement, a well drilled DR plan and some redundant links in place. And a hot site.

While this product has some pretty obvious flaws in a real world situation, its good to see some innovation promoted. There’s a lot of good stuff in Canberra in this area that never gets any airtime. Things like network pattern analysis techniques and tools for security logging (develop a baseline of network traffic under normal load to detect security related anomolies) and CLUG, (with Andrew Tridgell of SAMBA and RSYNC fame – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tridgell ) as well as many others.

I’m a bit surprised that Canberra institutions haven’t researched and developed items in a number of spaces in the agricultural market such as RFID ear tags for stock control (think bluetooth for cows) given our dimensions, and then there’s our solar industry which basically moved to China as local funding is non existant. Innovation isn’t strongly encouraged or supported. ‘Safe science’ to guarantee repeat funding has been the norm since the 80’s.

There is a lot of untapped, under utilised and under resourced talent in Canberra. This govt and previous ones have severely failed in that arena.

We could take a leaf out of Ireland’s book of the 90’s and encourage growth and overseas investment, spend the same sort of time and money in R&D as we do in the AIS, or we could always just ship more mutton to our colonial overlords.

India is doing a better job and they don’t even have toilets.

bugmenot said :

Kramer said :

It’s technology, it’s designed in Canberra, and it’s cool – and it’s not from another big IT firm.

Technology – yes.
Designed in Canberra – not really. Maybe partially.
Cool – Meh.
Not another big IT firm – yes, it is actually, APC.

I know the article is relevant to Canberra, but the idea of a data centre in a shipping container has been done many a time before. There’s really nothing new here.

Where I work, we looked at the likelihood of deploying one of these solutions for a disaster and the responses from the various suppliers all indicated massive delays in obtaining them. Essentially, the only units around were demo units and not easily able to be made operational.

We ended up going with alternate solutions due to suppliers not being able to deliver in a reasonable timeframe. Even with a couple of months notice, it was almost certainly not going to meet our deadline.

I assume that whilst it may have been designed (or plagiarised) in Canberra, the manufacture is going to be overseas (or at an unlikely best, interstate), which means that delivery times are still going to be an issue.

If you have that sort of time up your sleeve, why would you not just look at co-location into an existing data centre? There’s two new data centres in Canberra ready for space allocation and another being built shortly, plus the current local co-lo facilities.

bugmenot,
the datapod concept design is different to the sun and ibm units. It has been based solely around the APC infrastructure solutions, but when you buy the pod, it is empty. There are no racks, cooling or power. These are addons through APC.

Up until the launch, the concept was owned by datapod. they may well have sold it to APC, I do know that they are in the process of changing their name, but i don’t work for either of them and don’t know that information.

In regards to the assembly, currently ecowise are doing the fitouts. if the demand outstrips their capacity, which I doubt, it may well end up in another state for assembly.

What happens when a site is required outside of the metro or major regional centres, on a mining site, perhaps, can you shift a conventional datacentre? how long would the pull down and re-build take? what about being able to drive in a container, plug in the generator, fill the tanks of water from the truck (1500L) and fire it up?

the guts of the unit isn’t plagiarised – many of the large firms buy their UPS & Racking solutions from APC already, and re-badge them.

I just thought (naively) that it was interesting to canberra as it was a product that has been taken up by the media big time, and is being presented at APC events all over australia. If it is a concept that has been done before, great. maybe the datapod is a better version.

I didn’t think the baseless “why is this on RA” stuff was going to make it through moderation anymore. *shrug*

Might not be original, but not much is these days. Well done Datapod.

Kramer said :

It’s technology, it’s designed in Canberra, and it’s cool – and it’s not from another big IT firm.

Technology – yes.
Designed in Canberra – not really. Maybe partially.
Cool – Meh.
Not another big IT firm – yes, it is actually, APC.

I know the article is relevant to Canberra, but the idea of a data centre in a shipping container has been done many a time before. There’s really nothing new here.

Where I work, we looked at the likelihood of deploying one of these solutions for a disaster and the responses from the various suppliers all indicated massive delays in obtaining them. Essentially, the only units around were demo units and not easily able to be made operational.

We ended up going with alternate solutions due to suppliers not being able to deliver in a reasonable timeframe. Even with a couple of months notice, it was almost certainly not going to meet our deadline.

I assume that whilst it may have been designed (or plagiarised) in Canberra, the manufacture is going to be overseas (or at an unlikely best, interstate), which means that delivery times are still going to be an issue.

If you have that sort of time up your sleeve, why would you not just look at co-location into an existing data centre? There’s two new data centres in Canberra ready for space allocation and another being built shortly, plus the current local co-lo facilities.

Where’s the “Recommend this story” button?

RA is about local news. This is local news. Totally appropriate.

babyface said :

why is this on the riotact?

Oh yeah and I’d much rather be reading a post about ‘Good Recommendation for Car Door Fixing’. Rivetting stuff.

This is a Canberra success story stop hating.

babyface said :

came to the comments to note that this idea is anything but original but i found it had already been done for me. also how is this anything but a blatant shill? why is this on the riotact?

Imagine if Fleming and Florey’s discovery of penicillin was posted on RiotAct? “So what, my fruit bowl is full of mouldy oranges. Yawwwnn”

Or the response to the Wright Bros flight would be a complaint about aircraft noise