What Web 2.0 Means for Hardware and the Datacenter

Tom's Hardware has a quick look at the changes being seen in the datacenter as more and more companies embrace a Web 2.0-style approach to hardware. So far, with Google leading the way, most companies have opted for a commodity server setup. HP and IBM however are betting that an even better setup exists and are striking out to find it. "IBM's Web 2.0 approach involves turning servers sideways and water cooling the rack so you can do away with air conditioning entirely. HP offers petabytes of storage at a fraction of the usual cost. Both say that when you have applications that expect hardware to fail, it's worth choosing systems that make it easier and cheaper to deal with those failures."

Comments

So, after reading the article ... don't bother.

[oneiros27]

They mention 'sideways', and I thought they just meant rotating about the depth of the rack (ie, so a 19" rack would be about 11U wide), but the discussion is talking about the fans being 15" away vs. 25" ... which makes no sense, as they're mentioning servers being 47" deep. I think they're talking about side venting, which is what Suns _used_ to have, but you'd have to get these 30" wide racks (so there'd be ducts on each side for airflow in/out)

And we have the useless quote:

"In a data center the air conditioning is 50 feet away so you blow cool air at great expense of energy under the floor past all the cables and floor tiles," McKnight said. "It's like painting by taking a bucket of paint and throwing it into the air."

I'm not going to claim that forced air is more efficient than bringing chilled water straight to the track, as it's not -- but the comparison is crap -- anyone who's had to manage a large datacenter will have had to balance ducts before -- it's not fun, I admit, but you don't just pump the air in, and expect everything to work.

Then there's the great density -- 82TB in 7U. I mean, that's not bad, but the SATABeast is 42TB in 4U (unformatted), and I'm going to assume a hell of a lot cheaper. (although, it's a lower class of service). And HP's not using MAID yet, but spinning all of the disks.

My suggestion -- skip the article. It reads more like a sales brochure, with very little on the actual technical details of what they're doing.