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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."
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
Uh, I administered a Windows server in Puerto Rico that had a bad T1 line, we were measuring up to 40% packet loss at times and while RDP dropped it auto-resumed once the packetloss went back down. I can't imagine trying to use SSH or X to do the same. RDP also works acceptably over 28.8 dialup, I haven't seen any flavor of X do that. You can bash MS for many things but RDP is not one of them, of course it's a good technology that they stole from Citrix but.....
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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?
If you have the right hardware, you don't need to be on-site. Serious servers come with something called lights out management. This utilizes a self-contained ROM-based system that's always running, even when the main system is shut down (or displaying a BSOD). As long as the system is getting power and there's an Ethernet cable connected to its management port, a remote user can do anything that an onsite user can do, provided it doesn't require opening the cover of the system. You can even re-install the operating system, used remote ISO and floppy images.
I'm the documentation lead for a server with a LOM that's very fancy indeed. There's a graphic terminal service that supports things like interacting with the BIOS, or logging into the server's GUI. There's a LOM command line you can access using a serial connection or over SSH. The LOM also supports IPMI, which is kind of a basic necessity when you have a lot of servers, even if they're all down the hall.
This server is certified for Windows 2003 (and I understand a lot of our customers buy it for that fell purpose), so it would be ideal for Microsoft's container. However, we have a our own competing container product.
And yes, the company I work for is Sun, and yes, we're selling Windows-based systems now. Shocking, isn't it?
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.