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."

Comments

They are tougher than most people think.

[Chrisq]

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.

Re:That's all fine and good

[dedazo]

Still, it's an interesting approach even if you're *just* dodging bullets and this is a disaster recovery scenario for your company. If anything it proves that you don't need a white-room, halon-protected, perfectly air conditioned data center to run your business, which seems to be the common belief across the US, European and Canadian enterprise.

Just ask any of the companies in the Gulf area affected by Ike if they would have been glad to have something like this in place a month ago.

I could have told them that computers tend to be resilient. I ran lots of them for many years in a little room at ambient temperature or higher, and high humidity. Every time I opened one of them up to upgrade or something I was amazed that they would even run at all. And the dirt...

Re:That's all fine and good

[glop]

You are talking about the other kind of datacenter.
Regarding this issue you have 2 kinds of datacenters:
  - the cluster/cloud type where servers are expandable. They might die but you don't care because you have loads and all your data is redundant (e.g. Google, most nodes of a cluster, web servers etc)
  - the big iron kind where you buy high quality machines, support, redundant power supplies, redundant NICs, pay people with pagers to babysit them, lower the temperature to increase the MTBF etc.

All this research applies to the first case. You are right to pinpoint that in the second case you will still want to take all the precautions you can to avoid failures.

Re:Software vs Hardware Engineers

[UnknowingFool]

Agreed. This is more an ad for the servers (HP) than it is for software (Windows). If these servers didn't have a hardware failure in many months outside, that says a lot about the servers. I know my server at home couldn't do it no matter what OS I used.

Re:That's all fine and good

[Bandman]

I'm pretty sure my SAN's redundancy has nothing to do with servers attached to it dying.

With the July heat, it's not just the baked electronics in the servers, either. Your hard drives become less and less reliable, and their expected lifetime is far shorter after they've operated for any length of time in conditions like you're experiencing.

You also completely ignore the cost of the downtime itself. Doesn't matter how much it costs to restore the data if you're down long enough that your clients lose faith in you and leave.

"Good will" is on an account sheet for a reason.