Bill Larry’s foot hovered in the air, while he waited to take a step forward. The data center dropped down. Then it lurched up. Bill waited for a moment more, judged the motion, and then leaped. The data center retreated from him at the last second, but he made the jump onto the adjoining floating barge.
Bill took a happy breath of ocean air, and felt the barge rock under him. This was his project, his mark on Avogadro. After starting out as an IT system administrator, his skills with people led him into management. After he got his MBA, he took a program management position with Avogadro in their data center facilities organization. Now in his early forties, he found himself riding helicopters to visit the modern pinnacle of high tech data centers: the offshore floating data center.
In the last decade, Avogadro invested in offshore power generation R&D. That investment had paid off with efficient electricity generation. Avogadro’s Portland Wave Converters, or PWC, were powered by oceanic waves. The waves never got tired, never ran out, and never needed fuel, so it was a very lucrative proposition once the wave generators were built. Gazing off to either side of him, Bill could see the PWC stretching out, a long line of white floats on the surface of the water, anchored to the sea bed below.
After developing the generation capacity, Avogadro engineers recognized that if electricity was generated offshore, it made sense to put the data centers offshore as well. Ocean real estate was effectively free. Cooling the thousands of servers located within a small space was tricky and expensive on land, but easy in the ocean, where cool ambient temperature sea water made for very effective computer cooling. Now Avogadro had an entire business unit devoted to utilizing the potential of these novel offshore data centers. Avogadro worked to refine the design, with plans to use the offshore data centers existing for their own operations, and lease cloud computing capacity to commercial customers.
Directly in front of Bill, the primary floating barge held what appear to be sixteen standard shipping containers. They had in fact originated as standard shipping containers, but Bill’s team had added a thick layer of weather proofing to protect the sensitive electronics contained within.
Of course, these floating data centers had a few problems that got Bill up in the middle of the night. Resiliency to storms was one big issue. But the weather had been clear last night, so that wasn’t the reason Bill was here this morning to inspect Prototype Offshore Data Center, or ODC, #4. Located 12 miles out from the California coast, ODC #4 was identical to ODC 1 through 3. A quarter mile line of Portland Wave Converters generating 25 megawatts of electricity, divided in the center by two large floating barges.
The barge behind Bill was surplus, serving simply as a helicopter landing pad. It wasn’t part of Bill’s original design, which had assumed that maintenance would come by boat. Then again, Bill hadn’t realized how many maintenance trips they would end up needing to make to the prototypes.
Avogadro had ruggedized the containers, communication equipment, and power generation equipment to the maximum feasible level, and they should have required barely any maintenance at all, even out here in the corrosive salt water environment. In fact, the entire system was designed to require only a single maintenance visit each year to replace servers. Unfortunately, the entirety of ODC #4 went offline the previous night at 4:06am. That’s what required this early morning visit. Bill and his team flew out from the company’s land-based Bay Area site as soon as the sun rose.
As Bill stepped closer to the cargo containers, he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach, and it wasn’t caused by the rolling and pitching motion of the barge. He saw burn marks on the side of the containers that could only have been caused by one thing: a welding torch. Bill shook his head in dismay. No hand-held welding torch should ever have touched these specially treated containers.
A closer inspection confirmed his fears. Bill saw a ragged hole cut into the side of the container. After the first theft three months ago, the cargo container doors had been hardened against possible thievery attempts, but the sides had no special treatment apart from the additional weather proofing.
While the other members of the team worked on opening the doors, Bill stuck his head in the container through the hole, and pointed his flashlight around. The racks that should have held hundreds of high performance computer servers were mostly empty, wires dangling everywhere, and various bits of low-value electronic equipment haphazardly strewn about.
Bill took out his Avogadro phone from his overalls to send a message to the email distribution list for the rest of the Offshore Data Center team. It would take more than a small maintenance team to fix ODC #4. The organization would need to kick into high gear to ship out new containers and servers.
Bill wanted to bang his head against the wall in frustration. The ODCs were located about ten miles offshore. Between the distance, and the lack of facilities for people, it was impossible for them to station anyone on board twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Besides, anyone stationed on board would be at risk from pirates. Bill knew that he and Jake Riley, the ODC Lead Manager, would be meeting with senior company management later that week to address the piracy issue. The entire ODC rollout plan was on hold pending a resolution. It didn’t bode well for Bill’s chance of getting a bonus or a raise.
It was a damn tough problem. A full floating data center could contain almost eighty-thousand servers along with their requisite hard drives, power supplies, emergency backup batteries, and communications equipment. Although none of the prototype floating data centers had been at full capacity yet, they still had about twenty-thousand servers onboard worth close to ten million dollars. That was a substantial target. Worse, it wasn’t clear yet whether the target truly was the computer equipment or whether it was the potential customer data on the server hard drives.
When Bill saw the destruction the pirates caused and reflected on the amount of work it was going to generate, even he could see the sense in Jake’s controversial proposal to give the ODCs deterrents that would prevent pirates from boarding them. That didn’t stop a chill from running through him when he thought about autonomous robots with guns being stationed on board the data center.
“Hi Mike, what a surprise!” Christine smiled at Mike, then hugged him warmly. “David didn’t mention you were coming over for dinner. Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll let David know you’re here.”
She tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear, and turned to walk upstairs to fetch David.
Mike admired Christine as she walked up the stairs, and then turned to look around at the house while he waited. Lucky David. The early twentieth century home was an American Four Square: a classic, stylish, and desirable Portland house. The Four Square, so called because each of the four outside walls was a near perfect square, was larger than Mike’s own bungalow. On the other hand, like many other Portland Four Squares, David and Christine’s house had been extended by the previous owners to include a large family room on the main level. As a result, and because of David and Christine’s tastes, their interior was now a mixture of modern design and pure geek. Ikea furniture was interspersed with computers, and dominated by a high end gaming system in one room. Mike looked on admiringly. He tried, but his own place just looked like his college apartment.
Mike gazed at a photo of David and Christine on the mantel. Single and lacking family in town, it wasn’t unusual for Mike to drop in for dinner with Christine and David, especially when he was between girlfriends. Of course, he usually didn’t drop in unannounced, but he had a pressing reason to talk to David tonight. Mike had figured out just that afternoon what was going on with ELOPe. He now understood the unexplained activity in the ELOPe system, and the unexpected and unlikely allocation of dedicated servers. It even explained David’s strange behavior in the office when David announced that they had been granted additional servers. His hands were sweaty at the thought of confronting David. It was the first time that he’d ever known David to be less than totally honest with him.
Mike snapped out of his reverie at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. David clasped Mike on the shoulder warmly, and led him into the kitchen, with Christine following them.
“Vodka martinis everyone?” Christine suggested, following their long standing tradition.
“Sounds great,” Mike and David answered simultaneously. They smiled at each other. For a moment, Mike felt the strong camaraderie he had shared for years now with David.
Mike and David sat in bar stools on the opposite side of the counter from Christine. Christine grabbed a bottle of Stolichnaya and glasses.
“It’s good to see you,” David said, still smiling.
Mike swallowed. It was harder to confront David now that he was back to being himself. It would have been easier if David was still distracted and vague.
“So why the unexpected visit?” David asked.
Christine gave David a funny look as she realized that he hadn’t invited Mike over.
“It’s about ELOPe.” Mike clenched his fists.
“Oh, I heard the good news from David,” Christine said, wetting glasses with vermouth. “You guys finally got dedicated servers. That’s exactly what you needed to move on to the next phase, right? Congratulations.”
“Yes, well, I have an idea how we got those servers.” Mike kept his eyes on David. “It seems ELOPe was turned on a little early. Like a few days ago.”
David smiled, and responded “What makes you think that?”
“Well, you asked me to turn on ELOPe for all internal Avogadro emails. Which I did, two days ago.”
“Were there any problems?” David asked.
“No, none at all. That’s the problem. I expected a big spike in background processing activity as I gave ELOPe access to emails across the company.” Mike turned to Christine. “That is what happens any time we add new email sources to ELOPe. It has to start analyzing the backlog of emails. People typically have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of emails in their inboxes, so when we add them to ELOPe, there is a massive increase in system activity. So when I added ten thousand Avogadro email inboxes, I expected a giant spike in activity, especially considering all of our performance problems.”
Mike turned back to David. “But you know what I found, right David? No spike. Hardly any activity at all. Now why would that be?”
Christine stopped at Mike’s tone, olive covered toothpick hovering over a glass.
David shrugged, and slumped down in his chair. “Why?”
“The only explanation is that ELOPe had already been given access to everyone’s email across Avogadro.” Mike jabbed at the counter and raised his voice despite himself. “I didn’t see a jump in activity, because it had already processed all the email for all those people.”
Mike paused, but David didn’t say anything. “You already turned it on, so it could help you with the proposal for the dedicated servers,” Mike prompted, guessing at David’s motivation.
David wasn’t smiling anymore. “I did.”
“But David, why didn’t you tell me?” Mike paused. “It’s fucking awesome that ELOPe works. You typed out a message, and the system gave you suggestions, and those suggestions were persuasive enough to persuade Gary to give you the server allocation! Why would you keep that secret? I’ve been chasing down performance spikes for days for no reason.”
David twiddled his finger on the countertop, clearly awkward. “I was trying to protect you. You know we didn’t have permission to have ELOPe analyze live customer emails on Gary’s servers. I could have been fired. Now that we have our own dedicated servers, it’s no problem, of course. But I didn’t want you to be worried, or worse, implicated in what I was doing.”
“We are in this together. This is my project just as much as yours.” Mike paused, and relaxed. “Look, next time, just tell me what is going on? Do you know how I felt when I realized you were keeping secrets from me?”
David shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry.”
“Ok, now forget all that moping about.” Mike’s expression transformed to one of delight. “ELOPe works. After two years of building that damn thing, it fucking works! Let’s celebrate.”
Mike grabbed his glass, and raised it in a toast.
David looked up to see a big smile on Mike’s face, and smiled himself.
The three chinked glasses.
David helped Christine clean up after dinner. Mike had gone home after a dessert of chocolate chip cookies and ice cream. They had joked that David and Mike had the culinary preferences of twelve year old boys. David cleared dishes and plates while Christine loaded the dishwasher.
David thought about the evening. After they had gotten the deception out on the table, everything had been fine. Mike had been elated that ELOPe was working so well, and seemed happy enough to put the other issue behind them.
“Why so quiet hon?” Christine asked.
“Just thinking.”
“You’re not just thinking. Thinking is when you’re quiet, but snapping your fingers.” Glancing over, she saw her husband smile. “You’ve been moody all week. If this is about lying to Mike, well, he knows now, and he forgives you. Let it go.”
“There’s more,” David said heavily.
“More what?”
“More that Mike doesn’t know. I didn’t just turn on ELOPe. I did turn it on, and I obscured what it was doing, so it wouldn’t show up in the system logs. But I also did something else…” David trailed off.
“Well, are you going to tell me, or do I have to put bamboo under your fingernails?”
“I gave ELOPe a hidden objective.”
“What do you mean?” Christine asked.
“It means that when any email goes through ELOPe, and that would now be every single internal email at Avogadro, it checks to see if the ELOPe project could be affected by the contents of the message. Then ELOPe will do what it can to maximize the success of the project.”
“What does that even mean David? What can it do?” Christine stopped washing dishes and stared at David.
David looked away from her accusatory gaze. “Well, it can’t do anything but rewrite emails,” he said, throwing his hands up in the air. “But because I turned off the logging, I can’t see exactly what changes it makes to those emails. I turned the system on, and the very next day, I got an allocation of five thousand servers. Sheesh, I would have been happy with five hundred servers, never mind five thousand. Five thousand servers, built and installed, is close to five million dollars. How did ELOPe get someone to spend five million dollars? And that’s not all.”
David paused to catch his breath. He started to look around and whisper, but he realized that was foolish. It was only he and Christine in the house. “This afternoon I got an email that we just had a team of contractors assigned to the project. They hired some topnotch performance specialists to help us optimize ELOPe. God knows we need the help to try to fix performance, but I never even asked anyone for help.
“That sounds damn freaky.” Now Christine had given up on the dishes, and was standing with her hands on her hips. “Why the hell did you do any of that in the first place?”
“We were just a couple days from the whole project getting cancelled. Gary Mitchell was going to bounce us off his production servers.” David’s shoulders slumped in despair. “You know, ELOPe is a massive consumer of processing resources. We’re not even production-ready, and we’re already consuming almost as many compute cycles as the production Search and Email products that are serving hundreds of millions of customers. Hell, I abused Sean’s blessing in the first place to get way more server resources than he ever intended to give us. Gary would have bounced us off his servers, Sean would have found out just how many resources we were consuming, and that I distorted what he said to get those resources, and that would have been it for the project and me.”
“Jesus David.” Christine had her arms crossed and was tapping her foot now, which alarmed David. The last time she did that he had spent on the night on the couch. “How the hell did you let it snowball like this? If you’re so worried about the override you put in the software, take it out. Or have Mike take it out for you. The way you make it sound, it’s like resources are being stolen from all over the company, and everything is going to be pointing back at you.”
David brightened. “Yeah, we just need to take out the override before anyone gets wind of it. I was nervous about doing it myself now that the code is live on the new servers. I didn’t want to crash a live server by trying to do it myself — I could potentially bring down the entire Avogadro Mail system. But with Mike’s help, we could do it live.”
He gave Christine a big kiss. “Thanks for talking with me about this. Let me go send an email to Mike.”
Christine heard David’s footsteps running up the stairs to their office. She sighed and turned back to the dishes. Husbands made everything so much more complicated than they needed to be. Maybe she should have just gotten a dog instead.
Upstairs, David sat down in his office. He tapped impatiently at the touchpad, and started in on the email.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for coming over tonight. I’m glad we talked.
But we need to meet early tomorrow morning. There’s something I didn’t tell you about ELOPe. We need to live-patch the production internal email systems to remove a part of ELOPe. You’re the only one with the experience to do it. I’ll tell you the details tomorrow morning. — David.
David relaxed as he hit the send button. With Mike by his side, they could fix anything.
Jake Riley, graying around the temples, but dressed sharply, put up a photo of the data center breaking. He was tired, having worked a twelve hour day, but he forced himself to keep his energy high for the presentation. They were lucky to get this meeting with the executive team, even if it was scheduled for 9:30 pm. “This morning Bill flew out to Offshore Data Center #4, off the San Francisco coast. Pirates used welding equipment to cut holes in the sides of six of the cargo containers onboard ODC #4, and removed the servers from those containers. The server racks and power transformers were left behind, but they were effectively destroyed.” He switched to an interior photo showing the pillaged container.
Jake paused to look around at everyone in the virtual conference room. “That brings us to three pirate attacks in as many months. Two on the West coast, one on the East coast.”
Jake Riley was the Lead Manager of the Offshore Data Center project. With the help of Bill, they were briefing Kenneth Harrison and CEO Rebecca Smith on the piracy problem. The issue had caused a hold up in the ODC rollouts and therefore caused a small but growing hiccup in the Avogadro’s master data center rollout plan. Server capacity requirements doubled every thirty months at Avogadro, and were expected to continue to grow at that rate. That they were meeting at 9:30 at night was a sure sign of just how critical server capacity was to the company’s growth.
“Tell us about hardening the units. You already do some hardening, right? Is there anything more you can do?”
This question came from Kenneth Harrison. Kenneth and Rebecca Smith were located in the Oregon virtual conference room, while Jake and Bill Larry were in the Palo Alto virtual conference room. Each room included high fidelity, directional microphones and speakers, high definition video screens and cameras, and all the processing power to link them up. All together the technology created an immersive simulation of a single conference room. To Jake and Bill, it felt like Kenneth and Rebecca were sitting across the conference table from them, instead of seven hundred miles away. Jake got a kick out of using the virtual conference rooms. He thought the conference rooms were the closest to a Star Trek holodeck he’d experience in his lifetime.
Jake could see Rebecca Smith scanning through the photos of the attack, a frown on her face. “The units are ruggedized for the maritime environment. In fact, a standard cargo container is watertight, and more than capable of floating for years on its own. Our container boxes are of course modified to allow electricity, cooling, and data in and out. But we also apply an additional weatherization layer to control humidity, and ensure optimum interior conditions given the corrosive nature of the salt water environment. After the first pirate theft, we modified the design and installed high security doors on the units in production, and retrofitted those doors to the existing containers,” Jake explained. While he spoke, he switched the overhead screen to a slide showing an exploded diagram of the container design.
Jake hated bad news presentations. He liked to be the guy who had only good news to report when he met with the executives. When he first heard about the offshore data center project, he knew it would be wrought with technical challenges, but he was comfortable with those. He knew that he’d have to bring on new employees with specialties in maritime engineering and construction, people who would clash with the culture of Avogadro, and that might present people management challenges, but he was comfortable with that too. He never expected that old-fashioned piracy would be his biggest challenge. Well, not quite old-fashioned, these had blowtorches after all. Pirates, damn it. He shook his head subtly at the thought, and went on.
“No matter what we do, there will always be a weakest link in security. The weakest link with ODC #4 was the container walls. Even if we harden those, there will be another weakest link. Hell, they could tow the whole thing away if they had a mind to. The reality is that the units are sitting out there in the ocean, miles away from shore and any possible response. Even with effective monitoring, if we have to scramble a helicopter to fly out, we’re looking at a one hour response time. If we have to scramble a boat, it’s a two hour response time. Those times are only if we have people staffed and ready to respond twenty-four hours a day.”
“Monitoring is very difficult as well,” Bill said. “We can of course easily monitor the interior of the cargo containers, where the environment is controlled. However, the exterior is subject to heavy winds, rain, salt water. We’ve tried three different models of security cameras, and they’ve all failed. Instead of finding out when pirates board, we find out only when servers are unplugged.”
Rebecca broke in. “The roll out plan for data centers calls for twenty additional offshore data centers within the next six months. Those ODCs are intended to be spread around the world to meet capacity requirements. We don’t have the real estate to put them on land where they are needed. We can’t centralize them because of bandwidth and latency issues. The ODC project is critical, as you well know Jake,” Rebecca emphasized. “Tell me you’ve got a plan to get us back on track.”
“Well, I know this is going to sound controversial, at least initially, but we do have a proposal. I hope you’ll hear us out before you make a decision. Do you recall the piracy problem off the coast of Somalia?”
Jake saw nods from Rebecca and Kenneth across the virtual table, and then he continued. “You may know that iRobot, the company that makes Roomba, also makes robots for military use?” More nods. “Well, the companies that were shipping freight around Somalia couldn’t just arm their sailors. The sailors of course have no training in hand to hand combat, and couldn’t reasonably be expected to repel a pirate attack.”
Jake put another slide up on the overhead screen, showing a small tank-like robot. “iRobot already had weaponized land robots, and exploratory maritime robots. They took the next step, which was to develop weaponized versions of their maritime robots. They deployed the robots on the ships that needed to pass near Somalia. There were two parts to their solution. An automated submersible robot that can attack and disable the pirate ship itself, and an automated robot on the deck of the ship that can repel would-be boarders. They deployed the robots on dozens of commercial ships in the area, and after three successful cases of repelling pirate attacks, there have been no major attempts at piracy in the last six months.”
Jake looked up at the screen. Rebecca and Kenneth were glancing at each other, and Rebecca’s frown had grown. Jake forced himself to keep going. He switched slides again, showing the submersible robot, and then the submersible robot and tank-like robot onboard a freighter. “We talked to iRobot, and I have an initial bid from them. They have recommended a similar package for our offshore data centers. Submersible robots to disable ships, onboard robots to disable boarders.”
It was hard for Jake to look Kenneth and Rebecca in the eye. He knew that he was walking a fine line here. Avogadro prided itself on their open, sustainable, fair culture. It wasn’t exactly a culture that was welcoming to the idea of violence and guns. He could hardly believe he had suggested putting weapons in a data center. There wasn’t even a single armed guard in all the land-based facilities to the best of his knowledge. They were, after all, an internet company, not a military contractor.
Before Rebecca could respond, Bill jumped in. “I know this may seem radical to put armed robots in place. But look at the facts. First, it has worked off Somalia. Second, it will scale to any number of data centers we care to deploy. Third, it’s cost effective because we don’t have to maintain people on board the data centers.”
“Go on, we’ll hear you out,” Kenneth replied, waving his hand to tell them to keep the details coming.
Jake and Bill went on to cover the iRobot proposal in detail. Jake displayed slides, as he and Bill took turns explaining the types of robots that would be used, and the quote that iRobot had put together in response to their explanation of the problem they were facing. They spent the greatest amount of time explaining the protocols put in place with the robots to ensure minimum loss of life and risk.
At the end of the presentation everything was quiet. Jake could hear the hum of cooling fans in the room. He felt sweaty under his clothes. He desperately wanted to go home. He discreetly glanced at the clock on screen. It was after eleven now. He’d been working since five in the morning.
Even Kenneth turned to look at Rebecca, clearly not willing to stick his neck out on this proposal.
After a minute, Rebecca finally responded hesitantly. “I would not risk human life for the mere loss of ten million dollars.”
She paused, and then went on more strongly. “However, the data privacy implications of losing the data stored on those servers are huge. Data loss opens up the potential for litigation from our users, and regulation from the government. Even more significantly, if we lose the confidence of our users, we’re sunk. Our cloud application strategy works only as long as our users have complete confidence in the security and integrity of their personal data.” She stabbed at the table with her pointed finger. “Losing customer trust in this case means billions of dollars of revenue. We cannot afford the loss of even one hard drive containing customer data, let alone the tens of thousands of hard drives in an ODC.”
Jake nodded, and went to respond, but Rebecca held up a hand to indicate she still wanted to speak.
“We are lucky that the ODC thefts have thus far been limited to non-sensitive search data,” she said, anticipating Jake’s input, “But we must migrate our email servers and document servers to offshore data centers within a few months, or we risk capacity outages. It’s not acceptable to allow confidential emails and documents to be stolen by pirates.”
Bill and Jake turned to look at each other. It sure sounded to them as though Rebecca was about to approve the proposal. Neither of them would have guessed that going into the meeting.
Rebecca cleared her throat before she spoke. “I want you to proceed with your proposal. That said, I want this to be structured that we pay iRobot for security, and have them own and control the hardware that does it. I don’t want Avogadro Corporation to own weaponized robots. Am I clear?”
A few minutes later, Jake left the virtual conference room. Even though it was his own proposal, or perhaps especially because it was his own proposal, he felt stunned. Within a few weeks, the ODCs would have their own automated self-defense capability. It felt like something out of the movie Terminator. Somehow he was the person responsible for it. He was definitely outside his management comfort zone.