Staffers at some London data centers won’t be burdened with long commutes when the 2012 Olympics roll into town this summer and jam up city streets. Instead, they’ll have futuristic sleeping pods to crash in so they can never leave work.
In the past month, a London company called PodTime has sold 19 pods at £1,375 ($2,190) a pop to three collocation facilities, including a data center operated by Interxion, says Jon Gray, the founder of the 1-year-old company.
Gray, who thought up the pod business one drowsy afternoon while working as a project manager for Merrill Lynch, was surprised when Interxion — which operates 28 data centers across Europe — approached him in February, looking to buy pods. They quickly struck a deal and Interxion had its first pods within a month.
Until then, Gray thought his target market was overworked financial staffers, airport travelers, and youth hostels. “To be honest, it was not an application for the pods that we’d ever though of,” he says. “We thought we’d come up with everything we could think of, but Interxion were the first [data center].”
Soon other London data centers were calling. Gray wasn’t at liberty to say who else has bought the pods, but one company bought four of them. A third company bought five.
The pods come complete with lockable doors, a magazine rack, a shelf power supply, LED lights and the special kind of burrowing thrills you can usually only get from an MRI. All in a 4x4x6.5-foot package.
In a press release, Interxion said that it bought the pods so that engineering staff could stay onsite for 24 hours a day, seven days a week during the games. “Interxion realized the need to take its resilience that extra mile to ensure that its facilities … were not hindered,” the company said.
How bad will traffic be? On some days, London’s underground subway system, the Tube, is expected to carry more passengers than it’s ever handled in the past — 4.6 million travelers per day. Local transit officials are encouraging businesses to let employees work from home, and they’re encouraging employees to be ready to juggle their travel plans in the event that transit systems are overwhelmed.
wired.com
These look like a lot of fun, although I imagine they're definitely not for claustorphobics. The site also includes a demonstrative video.
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