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Microsoft Mulling Portable Data Centers
1sockchuck writes "An architect of the Windows Live team has published a presentation advocating portable container-based data centers as the future of data center infrastructure. James Hamilton, who previously was GM of Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, contends that a distributed network of unmanned modular units 'transforms data centers from static and costly behemoths into inexpensive and portable lightweights. ... Multiple smaller data centers, regionally located, could prove to be a competitive advantage.' Both Sun and Rackable have rolled out prototypes of container-based 'data center in a box' products, and Hamilton notes that large generators are also available in trailers."
How do they plan on making that easy on an OS that needs regular attention? This isnt a Linux, OS/2, Sparc, AIX, BSD machine that you can dump in a closet (or container) for months at a time...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Hasn't Google already been doing this for a couple years now?
Didn't I read about a year or so ago, google doing this, part of the whole dark-fiber-purchase-thingy....
It's deja vu all over again.
Wow, the new goatse? Lol been a while since I got caught like that. Guess I better watch out for tinyurl links.
This takes Microsoft one step closer to becoming the Borg. Just wait until one of these mobile data-centre 'cubes' appears outside a rival software company, the voice of Ballmer comes booming out of a loudspeaker: 'We are Microsoft. Open your doors and surrender your intellectual property. We will take your technological innovation and call it our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours. Resistance is futile.'
In fact, didn't I see one parked-up outside Novell HQ recently?
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
Portable data centers? They can't even get portable music players right!
Sun had a shipping container that was painted black, i work for a construction company that has dozens of those shipping containers and they get hot as hell inside during the summer, who ever implements these things in a shipping container (especially black ones) better get a badass air-conditioner to keep those things cool...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Where are all the retired people going to live?
Wow, Microsoft states that the future is something someone has already invented! Sweet How Novel.
A Novel Datacenter Concept
Project Blackbox packages compute, storage, and network infrastructure capabilities into scalable, modular units outfitted with state-of-the-art cooling, monitoring, and power distribution systems. Customers will be able to order a variety of standard and custom configurations of systems, storage, networking, and software. Housed in a standard 20-foot shipping container for maximum flexibility, Project Blackbox will be easily transported using common shipping methods. Simple hookups for water, AC power, and networking will enable customers to quickly deploy Project Blackbox upon delivery.
Sun has one one the market, and it's been around for a couple months: "Project Blackbox".
As usual, the "visionaries" at MS simply feed us what others have invented as their great ideas.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's one thing to administer a low-maintenance UNIX box with SSH a long distance, laggy, crappy connection (it's same old same old and works almost as good as being there). It's another very, very different thing to hold a Remote Desktop session on those conditions (you'll want to stab yourself with MSDN CDs after a few minutes).
A superintelligent AI Mind needs a traveling data center a lot more than Microsoft does.
Robot artificial intelligence could travel the country with all human knowledge at its disposal -- inside the reefer truck.
Itinerant Minds want to know -- how much will one of these unnukeable furtive fortresses cost?
With Project Blackbox, it's obvious that Sun is paying attention to their customers. Need to expand the datacenter, but don't have the space? Use their portable container setup. It's sheer genius, esp. for emergency contigencies/disaster situations. If I were a CIO/CTO, I would be taking a SERIOUS look at Sun's product as part of my data/computing landscape.
(And no jokes about hijacking the container with a forklift or breaking into it... That's why you hire 24/7 security if the data is important to you.)
Microsoft seems hellbent on adding their marketing spin to the product arena. This is one instance where they need to SIMPLIFY their verbage. I'm sorry, M$ - I'm far more comfortable putting my IT folks on a laptop, managing a remote UNIX (Solaris) or Linux solution than a Windows-based setup. Not unless I want to keep sending my user to the container's locale every few days for one issue or another.
Microsoft needs to rethink their strategy here. I think Sun ($un?) got it right.
More of the same, "Oh yeah? Ours will be better AND cheaper!" talk from Microsoft.
Someone needs to explain to me who is rushing to buy these things.
High-voltage lines into the box and having air-conditioning running 24-7 just sitting in a parking lot will probably inspire a visit from the local city inspector.
Certainly after the neighbors complain.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
....nnnnggggg....nngGGGGGg....GAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!
Both Sun and Rackable have rolled out prototypes of container-based 'data center in a box' products, and Hamilton notes that large generators are also available in trailers."
This strikes me an awful lot like a white elephant- it's not terribly hard to stuff a bunch of computers and an air conditioner/heating system into a shipping container with (physical) shock isolation. For Sun, it sounds like they didn't do much more than install water blocks in their servers ("cyclonic cooling", my ass.)
More laughs:
It's not completely plug-n-play, however. The "data center in a box" requires chilled water to support the cooling system, in addition to Internet connectivity and appropriate power infrastructure. Markoff's story notes that the prototype "sits in a container case adjacent to a Sun office building here (Menlo, Park, Calif.), connected to two large fire hoses for water cooling and 500 kilowatts of redundant power."
500kW (which at 220V is over 2,000 amps- which is a HUGE hookup) of power is probably just for the computers. Figure at least some sizable chunk of that for cooling...
Power, cooling, security...this seems rife with problems...
Please help metamoderate.
Or is it electrons? I've finally stopped being bitter about it enough to ask the experts.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Historical note:
Truck mounted computing has been around since the computing stone ages. The 'newness' of putting it in a container, well... it's about as new as encrusting something in diamonds, maybe a cell phone, or mp3 player.
Depending on which sized container, and what provider you go with you end up with somewhere in the 500-1500 u range. Figure each U of computer costs at least $500, and probably closer to $3000 for big name brand power houses.
Okay, the overall computer cost of the solution is somewhere around $250,000 to $4,500,000. Add on license for MS software, and the total cost of could easily run up as high as you'd like.
And any forklift driver with a pair of bolt cutters can take it from you. These things will normally be sited in industrial areas. You are one forklift or truck driver away from losing that asset, ether physically or because of an accident.
Didn't Sun already do this?.
Embrace and extend, indeed.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
Who's going to reboot the machines every other day?
God Fucking Damnit
Google's Secret Plans For All That Dark Fiber? Nov 20, '05
Sun To Unveil Project Blackbox Oct 17, '06
Yes, they are about Google and Sun, but does "OMG Micro$oft is doing it too!!!!1111" count as news?
I took the tour today, got a neat tee shirt and free lunch too!
Wow, what an original an innovative idea! It's too bad that Google didn't think of this. Or I'd really expect that Sun would have come up with something like this by now. But it took those geniuses from Redmond to deliver true innovation!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
a lot of crashing going on in there...
James Hamilton, who previously was GM of Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services,
Am I the only one that read that last bit as "Microsoft Hostage Exchange Services"? I mean, I know MSFT likes to lock up your data in proprietary formats, but that's going a little too far....
-- Alastair
I know that, some years ago, the Internet Archive people were looking into building archive mirror sites into containers, then shipping them to distant parts of the globe.
Idea was multifold:
- Backup against natural disasters,
- eliminating transcontinental bandwidth bottlenecks for archive users,
- having a cheap, easy-to-build-and-deploy datacenter (Build, test, and load initial content where convenient, then ship it cheap, install it, check it out), and
- have a low-profile site to avoid vandalism and theft of equipment (a container on a slab with a fiber and a power drop).
- having
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I can see the value (not necessarily M$'s offering) for telecoms like Cingular, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast etc.
They've been doing "cell cite in a container" for years.
- Bring in the power and fiber or whatever (assuming it's not going to use a directional microwave link for the uplink side). - Pour a slab for the tower and container foundation.
- Erect a fence.
- Bolt the tower / antenna assembly onto the slab.
- Deliver the container to the slab and bolt THAT down.
- Hook up the power, landline, and antenna cabling.
- Turn on and configure.
- Lock up and leave.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/iloo.asp
some photos I shot of the sun blackbox thing:
5 7594333338018/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/linux-works/sets/721
its really cool to see in person. the equipment is very tightly placed inside. the water input and output valves are equally impressive.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
This concept has a strong point, and that's the ability to transport a pre-configured data center by truck, train, ship, or cargo plane. If you suffer a fire, flood, or other accident that knocks your site out of commission, just write a check and have your business running again tomorrow from a temporary data center parked out back (you do have up-to-date off-site backups for your data, right?). With the incredible lost-business cost of down-time there may even be a market for "insurance plans", where a portable data center is at your disposal in exchange for an annual premium payment.
A quarter to four and a half million?
You cast a wide net.
GE Water does something similar, and their security is very lax. GE Water is responsible for taking care of a couple hundred trailers with complete demineralization plants onboard. The customer hooks up water in, water out (generally firehoses), and power. This trailer contains several tanks full of filtration granules in a cascade type system. The resin granules are worth a lot of money. I heard a figure for what they cost per ft^3, and it was shocking. Each trailer has five or six filter tanks half or 3/4 full of resin. The tanks are the full width of the trailer.
The catch is that the trailers are extremely heavy. The truck drivers told me that they can't carry a full load of fuel, because they are that close to being overweight. They would spend an hour draining the water and getting every last drop out (in CT the driver foots overweight/speeding tickets). If you could find a way to steal one from a power plant though (or a similar place with a large demand for demin water) and find a buyer for the resin, you would be very rich indeed.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
My company almost bought a TON of Rackables. We're growing really fast and are building out multiple big DCs (>1k square feet) in the next year. These guys came in saying they could not only deliver a rack of servers on wheels, negating our data center operations team's need to rack everything, but also that they could double the number of servers we could fit in a rack.
The number of servers per rack is constrained by electricity. For a while we couldn't figure out how they fit 48 servers into the same amount of electricity that our current server vendor used to power 24 + 1 switch. That is until we pulled a server apart and saw that they are using LAPTOP CPUS. The servers don't perform nearly on par with normal ones. They were, and are, selling snake oil.
A Novel Datacenter Concept
Which is apparently based on a Cringely article from 2005, which may or may not have been lucidly based on a Google project.
Innovation at its finest.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Ignore the cornerstones in society and you'll reap what you sow..
So the original XBOX doesn't count?
There must be a size limit... I for one wondered how something so massive as the original XBOX could even exist. Shouldn't it exceed the Chandrasekhar limit? Perhaps that's it. Perhaps XXBBOOXX don't exist in a form that we can understand. The bloody things may very well have collapsed into singularities that float about the universe, consuming hapless victims, tearing them from reality with their merciless, Stygian flows. Oh noes, I'm feeling the most peculiar draw from the center of my universe...... aiiiieeeeee..............
XXXXBBBBOOOOXXXX
Because in here, time has no meaning!
Woohoo, just what I need. Keeping a baby like that running will be a bitch. Permanent employment in a box...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I think they misunderstood what podcasting is all about.
And the reason to regularly move these ("portable") data centers is...?
And Microsoft's experience with unmanned, yet critical path, infrastructure, that actually works without operator intervention is...?
Next they'll be selling us flying cars.
--
make install -not war
WARNING GOATSE LIKE IMAGE LINKED BY PARENT
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
well yes i know, i'm yelling to make sure people notice it before following the link
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Back in about 95 we put about 200+ servers and and workstations in huge steal trailers that looked like shipping containers on wheels. We then removed the sides and daisy chained them in the desert in Saudi Arabia after that HVAC & Aircraft style PDU's were attached and a satellite link was setup to the US. We would process & store data from the U2 sensors. In the US, intelligence agencies could get that data. IT was called CARS (Contingency Airborne Reconnaissance System). It was a mobile data center, we had to do this because you have to be line of site from the aircraft. Now they just stream the data over the satellite to the States. They use just one small system to relay data stream instead of a fully deployed mobile data center. A heck of a lot cheaper than the $320 million the original data system system cost. Deployment costs were astronomical. After Osama Bin Laden blew up the barracks they decided it might be better to rethink things.
I for one don't want my servers in a data center that is easy to move and hence easy to steal. Think about it, they just steal the datacenter, then they can take their time getting say cc and other personal data of your customers off the systems at their leisure.
Yea again Windoze is just copying an idea AGAIN. Sun has already done this. Its called the Black Box. I've even seen the thing running. Please MS try to do something new.
i was with military intelligence units when i was in the army, and i have seen some pretty cool systems built into truck trailers. the trouble with a portable data center is that as a general rule, really stable, powerful equipment isn't portable, and really portable equipment isn't very powerful or stable... just ask most laptop users. like an operating room at a hospital, your typical datacenter is very clean, controlled, and monitored environment. like a mobile OR, you are going to sacrifice contol of the environment for portability. i'm not saying that portable datacenters are impossible; i'm saying that they're not a good substitute for the real thing.
portability works for the military for a number of reasons:
for a portable data center to work, special care should be paid to reducing power and cooling requirements. cooling takes power, so cooler running equipment will consume less power. special care should also be taken to protect the equipment during shipping. computers don't exactly deal well with vibration or the bumps and bruises that can come with shipping. shipping by rail is especially dangerous with regards to bumping and bruising.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
This thing seems to be another copy of someone else's strategy. Namely Google. I didn't know about Sun's version. However the one advantage that Google has over Sun and MS is that they already have the infrastructure in place to execute this better. Since they have all that dark fiber, they can put one into place in the field a lot easier. Sure Sun and MS could purchase the bandwidth they need but Google seems to have thought of the whole concept not just one piece of it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"Gee, they're SO innovative at Microsoft"!
Morons.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Microsoft is yet again stealing other's ideas and using their power to make money. microsoft should get a heavy 'dupe' warning