Not sure if I really buy that the Switch security bot is a serious project, given that over-the-top security theater seems to be one of Switch's main marketing points. Their employees wear military tactical gear; their facility walls and gates are designed like they're meant to house a prison; they have racks of what appear to be real guns and riot gear displayed prominently behind the security folks that check you in. Factor in the Bond-villain architectural aesthetic and it's really just too much to take seriously.<p>Bizarro security roleplaying aside, Switch is probably the most professional and competent data center operator I've worked with.
> “The server rack is more than 50 years old. There is no other piece of technology in data centers that has survived for so long," Zsolt Szabo told DCD back in 2016.<p>Quick, someone tell him about floors, walls, ceilings, doors, and electric light.
Gone are the days of tape operators on roller skates, but this article is correct in its assessment that change in the datacenter moves at a very deliberate pace.<p>Oddly enough, I found the reading pace of this article similar to the change it describes. Nothing negative mind you, just gently rolling in its delivery.
My sense is that robots are in use more than the article makes out. Anywhere there is a risk of human error or repetitive work that can be simplified, you'll find robots are a candidate.<p>The main issues with robots in my experience is whether you can get the desired throughput while including planned and unplanned maintenance work, reconfigurations, etc. The upfront capital cost generally means you don't have the ability to have a drop-in replacement ready to go when a change is required. That results in downtime. Folk familiar with LEAN six sigma will know that hidden bottlenecks should be avoided or you build up large backlogs during downtime.<p>Good news for datacenter engineers is that fixing robots may become part of your remit in the future (interesting niche given the mix of software and mechanical). More interesting work will always exist!
There are various quotes about robots at Google, but the picture labeled "Google" is of an ordinary tape library (looks like a StorageTek / Oracle library). If Google has built robots, that's not one of them.
Back in the 90's we half joked that we needed a remote controlled robot with 3 fingers to press Alt Ctrl Delete rather than drive down to the data center at 3am to reboot a jammed server. I sketched "R2Reboot".
I'd think that a robot that could neatly wire up racks with cabling (ethernet, power, & fiber) would be quite doable and useful. Does anyone here have experience with such a project?
It would be fascinating if we had infinitely reconfigurable data center network topologies. Among other things, you could have eg Just In Time network rebalancers that could add more capacity between nodes that have a lot of traffic between them. The reconfiguration would have to be instant, or at least take less time than the actual data transfer to have any benefits.