Intel Considering Portable Data Centers

miller60 writes "Intel has become the latest major tech company to express interest in using portable data centers to transform IT infrastructure. Intel says an approach using a "data center in a box" could be 30 to 50 percent cheaper than the current cost of building a data center. "The difference is so great that with this solution, brick-and-mortar data centers may become a thing of the past," an Intel exec writes. Sun and Rackable have introduced portable data centers, while Google has a patent for one and Microsoft has explored the concept. But for all the enthusiasm for data centers in shipping containers, there are few real-world deployments, which raises the question: are portable data centers just fun to speculate about, or can they be a practical solution for the current data center expansion challenges?"

Comments

Why it probably won't work

[Z80xxc!]

It seems to me that there would be too many hassles for this to ever work. The equipment in a data center is expensive, and that equipment doesn't usually like being jostled around in a truck, let alone bouncing around at sea for a while. Although in theory it's a great idea, I just don't see it ever really working out. Also, what about security? Data centers need good security. If it's so easily portable, then it wouldn't be that hard for someone to just take off with one, whereas you can't exactly stick a real data center on your getaway car. TFA suggests a warehouse to store the things in to address security and such, but doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of having them be mobile?

Play games with taxes and states, too

[timothy]

If you have a business which can be housed in a portable structure of any kind, it makes it more likely you can move it across a border (state or national) when that makes sense, or just seem inclined to do so if the local powermongers decide they want more (of your) pie.

Coal mines? Hard to do it.

Hospitals? Difficult.

Big factories? Tough.

Data centers? If built into containers or container-friendly, you can start packing now ;)

(On the other hand, it also means that data-centric companies can angle for that famous and annoying "corporate welfare" by flirting with various states and municipalities seeking better goodies like tax abatements, "free" infrastructure additions, etc.)

timothy

Re:It has to be more expensive

[lucifuge31337]

Understand that my point is to stop the ghettoization you've obviously seen: again, real, proper data centers don't operate that way. Every been to 365 Main in SF? Horrible. 60 Hudson? It's a travesty. This is what happens when you colo: morons put whatever they want in whatever rack you lease them and plug it into anything they can get an extension cord to. This is not a real data center.

With containerized units being used as commodity infrastructure (which is increasingly easy to do with things like VMWare), this all goes away. No, it won't cover every possibility. You're still going to need somewhere to put those machines with weird cards, be they satellite connectivity, PSTN, etc. But the pure processing power portions of the DC can be kept "clean" and to spec with a few simple rules: the machines are what they are. If they break, an identical unit will be swapped back in.

Yes, it takes a different approach to server utilization, but it's one that becoming increasingly common in both large and small traditional data centers.

I'm tired of spaghetti. I'm tired of some idiot plugging both inputs of PDUs into two whips on the same generator. I'm tired of morons putting server labels over the only cooling vents on the front/back of the machine (if they even bother to label them). I'm tired of waiting for some kid at the colo facility to find a crash cart to tell me what some customer's server that has gone unreachable says on the console. I'm tired of idiots not racking machines with rails, and simply stacking a few on top of each other.

And let's face it - the guy putting his hands ont he equipment in a noisy DC is usually not the best trained or most experienced. And that's not going to change any time soon. It's simple economics.

These portable DCs are my OCD dream.