Jerry 🦙💝🦙Nov 20
While talking about datacenters and power with my youngest son, who’s an economist at a construction services company, I had the most brilliant trillion dollar idea: natural gas powered fuel cells in place of server power supplies. Instead of those super problematic power cords and PDUs and whatnot, there’s just a gas line running over the cabinets with some flexible gas line running to the back of each server. This is going to be great!
Show threadMuro deGrizecoNov 21

@jerry

I recall some fellows with the idea of a rack-mount hydrogen fuel cell for a UPS. I mean, and they had money to try out their mad ideas.

Show threadJerry 🦙💝🦙Nov 21
@murodegrizeco my time working at an electroplater taught me that there’s probably not a feasible path to hydrogen fuel cells. Hydrogen is an insidious little atom. Maybe materials science has come up with sometime since then but it causes so many issues with metals
Show threadMuro deGrizecoNov 21

@jerry

Oh, it was just the total wackadoodle dangerous nature of the idea, piping nice flamable hydrogen from tanks around inside a data center.

There are a bunch of ideas like that, weird outlandish ideas, that make little sense on careful consideration, but capture the imagination!

Show threadJerry 🦙💝🦙
@murodegrizeco I have long hypothesized an idea to protect data on servers that are under attack. My original idea was to put airbag behind each of the hard drives that would detonate in the event of an attack, rendering the data inaccessible. But having a source of hydrogen would open up all new possibilities
Nov 21 at 3:35amWeb
Show threadMuro deGrizecoNov 21

@jerry

Back when we used more CD media, there was a linux command "eject" that you could run and the CD would eject.

It was mildly amusing to imagine that one could run the command with hard disks as the arguments, and the drive sleds would each pop out and fall to the floor of the server room.