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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."
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.
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.