Cloud Constellation Corporation's SpaceBelt orbital servers

[Ronsmytheiii]

Cloud Constellation Corporation today announced it has completed its Series A funding round.  The funding will be used to accelerate the development of the company's SpaceBelt Information Ultra-Highway, the independent space-based network infrastructure for cloud service providers, enterprises and governments to provide secure storage and provisioning of sensitive data around the world

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cloud-constellation-corporation-secures-series-a-funding-300232290.html

So it sounds like they want to create a secure network by putting servers in space?

[Lar]

Interesting to see if they get traction. Seems opposite of how we think CommsX will play out.

[Robotbeat]

Interesting to see if they get traction. Seems opposite of how we think CommsX will play out.

The opposite? Several suggested that some small proportion of servers could be colocated on-orbit. Perhaps some customers with particularly latency-sensitive applications. And perhaps some caching.

[virnin]

IMHO, seems like a lot of elevated temperature atmosphere.

The only thing orbiting servers will gain is immunity from terrestrial natural disasters, aka catastrophic storms, earthquakes, etc.  However, they will be much more vulnerable to space weather, from solar flares to CMEs.

Security for up/down links isn't magically better just because one end of the connection is in orbit.  As long as the black hats can get access to an endpoint on the ground, the satellite servers will be vulnerable.  As long as governments (and others) can buy/build missiles, the satellite servers will be physically vulnerable.

On the practical side, even solid state disk drives fail, power supplies, DRAM, etc.  Are they also designing in on-orbit servicing?  Backups?  Given the MTTR on orbit, data protection would rely almost exclusively on redundancy, significantly inflating the mass/TByte factor.

[Lar]

Interesting to see if they get traction. Seems opposite of how we think CommsX will play out.

The opposite? Several suggested that some small proportion of servers could be colocated on-orbit. Perhaps some customers with particularly latency-sensitive applications. And perhaps some caching.

Ya, opposite. CommsX, (my take) seems focused more on transport. Caching secondary. This one seems focused more on servers and less on transport.

YMMV.

[Robotbeat]

Interesting to see if they get traction. Seems opposite of how we think CommsX will play out.

The opposite? Several suggested that some small proportion of servers could be colocated on-orbit. Perhaps some customers with particularly latency-sensitive applications. And perhaps some caching.

Ya, opposite. CommsX, (my take) seems focused more on transport. Caching secondary. This one seems focused more on servers and less on transport.

YMMV.

Understood.

[RonM]

IMHO, seems like a lot of elevated temperature atmosphere.

The only thing orbiting servers will gain is immunity from terrestrial natural disasters, aka catastrophic storms, earthquakes, etc.  However, they will be much more vulnerable to space weather, from solar flares to CMEs.

Security for up/down links isn't magically better just because one end of the connection is in orbit.  As long as the black hats can get access to an endpoint on the ground, the satellite servers will be vulnerable.  As long as governments (and others) can buy/build missiles, the satellite servers will be physically vulnerable.

On the practical side, even solid state disk drives fail, power supplies, DRAM, etc.  Are they also designing in on-orbit servicing?  Backups?  Given the MTTR on orbit, data protection would rely almost exclusively on redundancy, significantly inflating the mass/TByte factor.

Yeah, you're right. This is not a good idea.

As someone who spent his professional career supporting hardware and software, including in data centers, I can tell you that sometimes you just have to go in the data center to swap out equipment. That's going to be hard to do if the data center is in orbit.

Then again, if they have governments and large corporations paying big bucks for the service, how about a Bigelow space station manned by hardware techs. Heck, I'd go back to work to do that.

[meekGee]

Modern data centers are actually specified now in units of MWatts.   And it's not single-digit MWatts either.

And that's with efficient convective cooling and infinite heat sinks.

("Data centers" is really a misnomer.  They are "compute centers", really)

I don't see the advantage.