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Microsoft Innovates Tent Data Centers
1sockchuck writes "The outside-the-box thinking in data center design continues. Microsoft has tested running a rack of servers in a tent outside one of its data centers. In seven months of testing, a small group of servers ran for seven months without failures, even when water dripped on the rack. The experiment builds on Intel's recent research on air-side economizers in suggesting that servers may be sturdier than believed, leaving more room to save energy by optimizing cooling set points and other key environmental settings in the server room."
Microsoft Pitches a Tent.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Subject says it all.
I'm sure it'll work fine untill someone strolls past, lifts up the canvas and walks off with the entire rack. Or accidently flicks a cigarrette but at the tent. Or....
Wow 7 months uptime... was it running Linux?
Yeah, what do the hardware engineers know who designed and tested the servers? Microsoft's software engineers can show them what the servers are really capable of, without even testing them out for all four seasons. /sarcasm
But what you're really doing in a situation like this is dodging bullets, rather than proving that we overbuild environmental in our server rooms. We KNOW that excess heat, water, humidity, etc can kill servers. These are facts that cannot be ignored.
I understand the idea here but still, do you really want to tell your bosses that the server room got to 115 F in July and killed the SAN because you skimped on the air units?
a small group of servers ran for seven months without failures, even when water dripped on the rack.
ie: The trick to water proofing is to let your system be constantly near over-heating, any contact with water immediately results in water vapour.
PHB: Well we just put up all of our servers outside. And it looks great! Say, what is that truck doing? Why is it driving so fast through all the security points... omg !
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
When I said there would never be any Microsoft servers running in my department, I don't think they quite got my meaning.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Air conditioning is expensive. Lets just raise the thermostat a little bit. Never mind that we exepect our IT folks to wear suits and ties, they can take a little bit of heat.
Why not raise the office temperature too. People don't need air conditioning.
I worked for a very small company that had a server-rack in a cupboard without ventilation. In winter we'd open the door to keep the office warm. In summer we'd keep it closed to stop making the office to warm - there was no air conditioning. The temperature must have varied from 16 degrees C, maybe lower at night to 35 degrees C and the server never had any problems.
I also worked with someone who worked night shift as an operator in a large company that did have an air-conditioned computer room. During the day the machine room was treated with reverence, carefully dusted with special cloths, etc.. He told me that at night when they got bored they'd play cricket down the central corridor with a tennis ball and a hard back book. The computer cabinets regularly got hit with the ball and once or twice had people run into them. On one occasion a disk unit started giving "media error warnings" but apart from that no ill effects again.
... does the tent have Windows?
Datacenter break-ins are becoming more and more commonplace, and it costs so much to replace the reinforced doors etc that the thieves bust up on their way in. Now with this innovation, they can just walk in and take the servers without doing any infrastructure damage. I think I'll pitch (groan) this idea to the boss right now!
Oh no... it's the future.
"The outside-the-box thinking in data center design continues. Microsoft has tested running a rack of servers in a tent outside one of its data centers. In seven months of testing
The phrase "Thinking outside the box" has evolved to mean "thinking unconventionally", but you know, there are enough non-cutesy phrases to mean exactly the same thing.
"Thinking outside the box" means thinking not about what you as a designer are designing, but how the customer is going to use the product once the box it came from is in the dumpster.
As to Microsoft's thinking, well, I've spilled beer on my PC without killing it, but I don't think I'd want to do it continually.
I can see where in a cold climate (here in Illinois two months from now, for instance) opening the window in the server room might be a good decision. Having the data center designed so air could be blown across it from one side of the building to another might be good, as well.
Free Martian Whores!
Funny how the military and the Live concert people have been doing this for years, but microsoft innovated putting servers in a tent.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
nice new abuse of the word.
I guess when Microsoft facilities people decide to change brands of Toilet paper it's called "innovating taking a dump"
This is ridiculous. There is no situation that comes to mind, even after some consideration, that would compel me to operate anything remotely critical in this manner.
Honestly, servers under a tent. I guess if the ferris wheel ever goes really high tech, the carnies will have something to play solitaire on
Check out my sysadmin blog!
While it's certainly an interesting experiment there is no way I would run my companies servers in a tent, especially a leaky tent.
Anyone who has built a few machines knows that hardware can prove to be a lot tougher than many people think it is. We once had a server running for over two years that had been dropped down a flight of steel stairs a few hours before delivery (we got the server free because it was really badly dented and no one thought it would actually run).
There is a difference between the above scenario though and the one where a whole rack of servers is sitting in a tent. One decent tear in the tent could easily flood the tent. Tough as they are I can't see any server running with water pouring into it and this scenario would result in the whole tent going down in one go. If you have to have a hot spare for this situation it's probably just easier to put it in a real building or a shipping container.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
And from the other side, I'm constantly telling people to clean the crud out of their machines. Just last week a co-worker brought in her boyfriend's machine because it "would not work". Two minutes of blowing out the dust in the slots (RAM, AGP and PCI) and it booted up just fine.
I'm in agreement with the "dodging a bullet" comment.
Just because it is possible that there might not be problems (unless X, Y or Z happens) is not the same as taking pro-active steps to reduce the potential problems.
Sure, their server handled the water dripping on it.
But then, you would NOT be reading the story (because it would not be published) if the water had shorted out that server. It would have been a case of "Duh! They put the servers in a tent in the rain. What did they expect."
With stories like these, you will NEVER read of the failures. The failures are common sense. You will only read of the times when it seems to have worked. And only then because it seems to contradict "common sense".
Maybe the PHB's are just trying to market to the many people becoming homeless due to the increase in foreclosures.
If there are going to be more citizens living in tent cities like during the great depression, corporate America will want to be there to provide desperately needed services, like up to the minute stock quotes and SPAM for new investment opportunities in Nigeria.
Oh my, who's that burly, rugged, well-tanned guy with the rolled-up shirtsleeves?
Him? Oh he's our server admin
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
While I agree with the notion of bulletproof data centers, I think one of the points of all these experiments, is that if you can save $100,000 a month on A/C and environmental costs, at the expense of reducing the life of $500,000 worth of hardware by 20%, you actually save money, because you spend so much more maintaining the environment than you do on the hardware itself -- as long as you plan for hardware failure and have appropriate backups (which you should anyway). On the other hand, if your hardware is worth a lot more, relative to your expenses, or if your hardware failure rate would increase sufficiently, then this approach wouldn't make any sense. It's all cost-benefit analysis.
-brian
How about using them in chillier climates to warm greenhouses and get a carbon offset? Might even prompt a healthier diet for workers if they were allowed to graze.
So .. Microsoft is doing NOW what the Marines and the Army have been doing since at least 1990 - running data centers under canvas.
Also - we had single sign-on then.
Awesome.
Display some adaptability.
And they even developped a prototype that could be seen at last years Chaos Communication Camp: http://ccc.simongallus.de/d/2173-3/CCC_070710_0529_001.jpg ;P
now let 'em try and sell it.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
They'll be testing this in Galveston, Tx.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I can see it now down here in the gulf coast. Servers powered by wind generators, tied down by guide lines so they don't fall over, and cooled by humidity.
Wait, what's that hurrican going to do to our infrastructure?
my "corporation" has been running servers in tents for going over 5 years now ;)
> suggesting that servers may be sturdier than believed
Anyone who thought you couldn't run a reliable server in 85+ degree heat in a sweaty, humid room with water dripping on a *sealed chassis* was a moron anyway. Most servers come with filters on the fan vents, are pretty tightly sealed shut
otherwise (and none of them would vent out of the top of a chassis because it would impact the servers above and below, so where's the water going to drip into?)
Air conditioning and all the other niceness we get in server rooms is just an insurance policy.
Next up, you'll have another tech-company claiming they've got their server's running without failure in the car park, nay, ground into the tarmac without significant failure rate increase.
It's a bit like extreme ironing; it's probably possible, but why would you want to?
throw new NoSignatureException();
>> In seven months of testing, a small group of servers ran for seven months without failures ...so I guess they must have had a small control group that were running Linux instead of windows :-)
This harps back to mainframe days. In order to keep your warranty valid, you had to strictly control the environment - including having strip recorders to PROVE that you hadn't exceeded temp or humidity limits. The reason was that the heat output of these ECL beasts was so high that they were teetering on the brink of temperature-induced race conditions, physically burning their PCBs and causing thermal-expansion induced stresses in the mechanical components.
Nowadays we are nowhere near as close to max. rated tolerances and therefore can open windows in datacentres when the air-con fails. However, the old traditions die hard and what was true even 10 years ago (the last time I specc'd an ECL mainframe) is no longer valid.
I'd suggest that if it wasn't for security reasons, plus the noise they make and the dust they suck up, most IT equipment could be run in a normal office.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Google runs on a ship (once step forward) and Microsoft runs in a tent (one step back)
Come on you know someone's going to have a Patent in the works on this, "use of computing equipment in a portable computer room environment, but without atmospheric H2O control"
Then we batter them to death with prior art of "but I used my laptop running WinNT4 Server in a tent 10 years ago"
--- This meme is memory intensive
How do you keep the carnies from messing with the servers, though? Or what if you get cotton candy stuck in the cooling vents?
Does it run Linux?
We got Microsoft doing something. (Oh that can't be good, or must be flawed)
We got an excrement that attempts to test extremes. (That means that microsoft wan't people to do this for real world situations)
It challenges and old truth. (Back in 1980 our server rooms needed to be run at 60F for optimal performance and they still are because truth never changes)
I don't think anyone is saying that your data centers should be allowed to be placed in rough environments. But it shows that you can turn your AC from 60 to 80 and still have thing run smoothly, and if the AC Fails you don't need to hire more expensive repair guys to come in immediately to fix the problem. You can probably safely wait for tomorrow.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Oh wait, it's Microsoft...
Good point, these are not Pacific Rim parts-in-a-box clones. These are DL585s. Hot-swapping redundant power supplies, redundant ROM, ECC memory and redundant NICs. These are the boxes that you're supposed to only power-up once, they should run forever.
If you're going to run them hot, it's best to have them outside because when all those fans go high, it's enough to wake the dead.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
In my experience, when cooling systems fail in datacenters, servers don't fair that badly. If there is a weak hard drive or power supply that was close to failure before the cooling issues, they would most likely fail, but for the most part the servers could endure rack temps over 100F.
What usually took the biggest beating and had the higherst failure rates were networking equipment(hubs, switches, routers, fiber switches and repeaters, etc). Fiber equipment being the worst of a bad lot.
WARNING!! Opinion follows-->
I always thought that most datacenters were over designed. I think a lot of the specs are hold overs from the IBM MF days when the big iron used to put out more BTUs than a small stove and was susceptible to even the smallest contaminants and moisture. The latter was due to the more mechanical nature of the older tape drives.
Seriously: what happens after a few years when the racks start to rust because of the damp air that they have been operating in ? They did this in Ireland - plenty of moisture there!
Unconventional data centers that don't provide adequate services will start costing these companies in other ways: canceled warranties. Warranty clauses always require that the company purchasing the equipment ensure an operating area within device specifications for humidity, temperature, shock, power, etc. The vendor can void the warranty if you go outside these bounds.
Currently this is not much enforced, except in egregious cases. I've even seen a vendor replace servers that fell out of a truck (literally) out of "good will," because it was a rare case. But if a company makes a stated goal of reducing operating costs by passing them onto the vendor via the warranty, expect these clauses to be given far more attention.
Big companies like Google and Microsoft are cash cows for enterprise vendors, and may be able to get away with it, but small- and mid-sized companies will not find success in these data centers, should they ever become a reality. Remember, an increase in a failure rate from 1% to 2% is doubling the warranty replacement costs!
Servers are very robust. So long as their fans are functional they'll stay well enough to run for some time.
However they will run a tiny bit hotter and their overall life may be shortened because of moisture and other elements.
Hell, I remember when the AC failed in a room with 70 servers and a phone system. Got very toasty in there very quickly.
This actually sounds like an intriguing idea, assuming the cost benefit analysis is done properly and shows a cost saving running server and other equipment outside. Keep in mind, many companies run hardware of various kinds outside and the only real cooling is a fanned front or side. And while in many cases they use weather proofed reinforced enclosures, they also use a little thing called a fence to keep the bad guys out. So anyone considering putting their servers under a tent outside and not spending a few hundred extra dollars on a 16ft razor wire and possibly electrified fence deserves what he/she gets.
...I'd be daft to build a server in a tent - but I built it anyway. And it was stolen.
So I built a second one. It overheated and caught fire.
So I built a third one. It got wet, overheated, caught fire and had parts stolen.
But the fourth one stayed up!
No, the phrase "thinking outside the box" has always meant thinking unconventionally, or outside of assumed (but not actual) limits. It has nothing to do with packaging.
The phrase comes from a puzzle. Take a 3x3 grid of dots (as below) and connect them all with just four straight lines (without lifting pen from paper). The only way to do it is to extend the lines "outside the box" formed by the outermost dots.
-- Alastair
Two words: Wind storm.
I think these stunts are very similar to the HP Bulletproof marketing where they would shoot a highpowered rifle through the motherboard during operation to demonstrate its redundancy.
You don't want to shoot your server but it demonstrates a worst case scenario to illustrate that it's a bit tougher than you might otherwise think.
Bill and Jerry go camping.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
microsoft is clawing at anything to stay competitive. first its the "im a pc" commercials (a rather flagrant rip of mac) next its "tent servers" which sound oddly familiar to googles storage crate noc. whats next? open source licenses?
oh wait, microsoft shared source...
Good people go to bed earlier.
... prisoners in Arizona's Maricopa County can train as admins and work from "home".
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Actually I think the original puzzle is to connect the dots with as few straight lines (and no curved ones!) as possible.
If the dots have size (as in my example above), and are not just zero-dimensional imaginary entities, then it can be done with just three lines.
If "straight" means "as confined to the plane of the page" and you allow the "plane" to be curved in the third dimension, it can be done with one line.
-- Alastair
I can imagine that good server equipment is much more sturdy than the average rack-geek thinks. That is, of course, unless you're using $299 desktops with server operating systems.
Got a Dimension GX260 running your business of 50 people with the same single IDE hard drive you bought with the system? Leave it inside! Oh, you mean you put a couple of 10k RPM drives with a RAID controller in that box which barely has enough airflow for the base system? Yeah, sure... DON'T cool it and see what happens.
In a modern server the fan speed (and power use) varies with the in-temperature. Saving 20kW on AC by running the room warmer doesn't help much if your computers increase the load from 200kW to 240kW just due to increased fan speed.
I see no mention of this in either Intel's or MS's experiments, even though it is the big reason our machine room is speced at max 18C intake air. Of course, we spend roughly 5kW to cool 240kW, so I can't really bring myself to think this is a big potential for improvement.
You can actually do it with three connected lines.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I was a server admin for a parachute infantry regiment for six years and I can tell you, from experience, that servers are a LOT tougher than people think.
On my most recent trip to Iraq, we ran about 25 Dell servers in a 15x15 ft wooden room with no insulation, very unstable power, a LOT of dust and two small AC units that worked sporadically and didn't blow air directly onto the servers. On average, it was probably 85-100 degrees in the room, depending on what part of the year. The only issues we had was from the power going out and power supplies not lasting until power was restored. We also had one drive go bad that had to be replaced. We also had a FAS270 network storage unit that we powered down twice, during our 15 month deployment. It took 4 bottles of canned air to clean it and the hard drives were still filthy. There were literally "dustcicles" hanging off the drives when I pulled them out. In the server room, we had to sweep 4 times a day to try to keep the dust down too. Oh, and, because we were a parachute unit, all of our servers were in hardigg cases that could be parachuted in. The servers were Dell 2850's and 1850's...beasts.
to see the Great Egress!
I've had my server outside on the balcony for a couple of years here in Norway. No problems at all - temperatures ranging from +40C to -20C:
I guess 'boot camp' gets a whole different meaning now.
or are you just happy to see me?
Servers may be sturdier than believed?
Gee, I always assumed that something that was priced far higher, labeled and marketed as safe, reliable, and redundant would be pretty sturdy.
If you treat a normal desktop machine with the kid gloves and filtered power and hvac that a typical server gets, it'll run just as long and be just as reliable. (Assuming you don't buy shitty parts.)
People think of servers in a fucking backwards way. We pay a lot because they're reliable, fault-tolerant, and sturdy. When did we get to the point where we had to treat them like infant kings? (When people started seeing them as a business investment, and not as a cost of doing business!)
You used to be able to buy a server and stick it somewhere, and be able to depend on it for years. Now the manufacturers put out crap that has to be babied, and is far less reliable.
This is a life-cycle thing. So five servers survived seven months. First year failure rates could be as high as 3% and they wouldn't have noticed. Let's see them run that thing for five years.
Corrosion is cumulative. It's not that useful to observe that something didn't fail from corrosion in seven months.
They really just want to sell hardware and software: "There is a possible benefit in having servers fail, in that this failure forces obsolescence and ensures timely decommissioning of servers." That's so Microsoft. They have to force their big customers onto Software Assurance, so they can't just keep running an OS with a perpetual license, like Windows 2000 Server, forever.
I believe Sheriff Joe has the patent on this one
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Lets see them try this in the desert.
For this we have to pay the Windows tax on our PCs?
I don't think the point was to get servers put into tents in the future. I think the point was testing the limits.
If a server can run in a tent, why not a shipping container that's elevated off the ground with both ends open and a fan in each end? Or maybe a specially modified van or other mobile vehicle? What about putting routing servers closer to the action in a ventilated wire closet on each floor?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I wonder if you're allowed to fold the paper... ;)
After all we're talking about tents.
Microsoft thought they'd get an Apache-server if they put a MS-server inside a tent.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Microsoft has always been a big supporter of the BSA.
Intel's experiment was useful, but not surprising to the vast majority of IT people who frequently put racks in closets, their offices, etc. because that's the only place we have for them. Intel is just giving us ammo for tell the datacenter guys that we don't really need them if they're charging too much.
Microsoft's experiment is simply ludicrous. For many obvious reasons, theft being the most obvious, no one would ever actually run a server on a tent unless you're on some scientific expedition to some place where there are no buildings and you're not staying long enough to build one and there's no bandwidth available, even by satellite.
While Intel is addressing the problem of physical space costing far more than the computers we can store in it, Microsoft is almost making light of it. Stupid Redmond bastards.
There was recently another article like this, where they tried a small server room with no A/C, just air-cooled. The problem with these is that a few servers will not generate too much heat in a tent, but once you try and scale this to the size of a datacenter, this just will not work due to the amount of heat and lack of airflow.
Also, keeping servers outside seems like a huge security risk, safety hazard, etc.
A hint is that what is drawn is not nine points, but rather nine small circles. You can draw long enough lines to spear all three while having enough slope to make it halfway up to the next row.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
In our new exciting discovery channel special; Bear is dropped into the wilderness with nothing but a bunch of boards, a magnesium fire-starter and his wits.
He has to eat a gecko, build a shelter, connect to the internet using hollow reeds, and set up a server farm powered by his own urine and, of course, windows server 2008.
Sadly, although Bear was initially successful, a virus wiped out the server farm long before the alligators ate it.
Nullius in verba
Yeah, but I was aiming for just one line, and folding works for that.
Not to be outdone by this, Google is testing servers on I-5 (carpool lane), IBM is placing servers in the dunk tank at the local carnival while Sun teamed up with Starbucks to test servers in the restroom.
Sounds like it needs patching
Or is that only for Apache?
That's redundant. All anyone ever does these days is "innovate".
Listen you English nazis, you're barking up the wrong tree going after the vernacular, slangs and such. Go after all the business book authors instead - they are turning the entire language into euphemism.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Stick any desktop machine on the floor in the corner of your non-climate-controlled apartment and chances are very high it will run fine continuously for years at a time, with maybe only a fan failure once every several years which is quickly and easily replaced...
7 months is nothing at all, this entire story is all just hype! And yes, as someone mentioned, perhaps to get people to shorten lives of computers slightly so they buy windows slightly more often...
The US Marine Corps did this already. During Desert Storm, (1991) they had battlefield data centers in the intense desert heat. Tents, with fans to generate a breeze. The network servers were mostly Banyan servers.
Come on, most hardware is pretty well-off against stuff as long as it's not in direct contact with water or as long as condensation doesn't form inside the case and shorts stuff out.
otherwise, heat's not a problem. I run an open case with a dual core X2 and a 9800 GTX+, 3+ TB of hard drives and a hotter than hell Rocketfish 700w PSU.
I don't encounter problems. The system never gets shut down, and it doesn't get ANYWHERE near as hot as my LCDTV.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You guys have got it all wrong. What we need is a really thick line...
... you set up a data center under tents.
I have been running servers in tents in the Marine Corps for years
nai oni...demo shinigami
...Can't wait for the politically incorrect illegal worker and outsourcing jokes to follow...
If your data centre survives running windows it can survive anything!
We keep an old telco room stacked with routers, switches, and servers at a cool 89 degrees. Not because we wanted to, but because some dumbass partner of ours decided he'd save money and install the A/C and venting himself... all the wrong way of course. 3 tons of cooling in an 8x20 room... and you get hit with the heat wave when you open the door. Sad/good thing is, our 15-year old used router gear there ... currently has a two-year uptime. Go figure.
Of course when it does eventually fail, the partner will be running around jabbering about anything other than the environmentals.
"You guys have got it all wrong. What we need is a really thick line..."
:).
Mod parent up
what are the security implications of running your data center's from tents? Surely it's going to look a lot more like a prison than a cool looking data center...
Liberate your PC today with GNU/Linux.
Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock smoking twitter!
since when is 7 months an achievement? Surely the point is equipment with a normal lifetime of 10 yrs only lasts 2 in a tent.
Some time ago a friend of mine worked in a steel works where they had a PDP 11/34 running the instrumentation and control for the milling machines. That is lots of heat, steam (from quenching the billets) and dust. For those of you who don't know these things, the Digital PDP was from an era when all the electronics were on big PCBs sat an a mostly wire-wrapped back-plane so if anything was vulnerable, it should have been. However despite a layer of probably quite conductive dust, the PDP worked for about five years without problems. The only maintenance was from the cleaning staff with a vacuum cleaner around the control room.
See my journal, I write things there