Free Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears by William Hertling Page A

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