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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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Yeah, what do the hardware engineers know who designed and tested the servers?
/sarcasm
They know what the servers will survive, not what it could survive.
When designing a machine to work from 10C to 50C and from 20% to 70% humidity, they don't deliberately design it to fail just outside that range. They just make damned sure it won't fail within those ranges (at least, not because of temperature or humidity).
Microsoft's software engineers can show them what the servers are really capable of, without even testing them out for all four seasons.
Sarcasm ignored, yes, Microsoft (or any of us willing to sacrifice a server for the cause) can indeed demonstrate that a server can live in a more harsh environment than intended. Because, as mentioned above, the hardware engineers didn't design the systems to fail just outside their spec'd range.
We (as a whole) tend to baby servers because they cost a lot... But the cost of maintaining a perfect environment for them far outweighs the price for the actual hardware; If you can chop that expense out of the budget for the 99% of your servers that don't strictly require five-9s uptime, the savings in TCO could potentially far outweigh the increased cost of more frequent hardware replacement.
They'll be testing this in Galveston, Tx.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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.
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
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!"
Not too long ago, there was a small furor in the local media about a major disaster at The State's Technology Services Division. The details were a bit sketchy â" mostly because The State was "unable to comment on an ongoing investigation" â" but what was reported was that, for two full days, employees of The State were unable to logon to their computers or access email, and that this caused business within The State to grind to a halt.
As the "investigation" carried on, the media lost interest in the story and moved on to more newsworthy stories like who Paris Hilton was partying with last weekend. Fortunately for us, a certain employee of The State named J.N. works in the Technology Services Division and decided to share what really was behind those fateful days.
When employees of The State came in to work following a three day weekend, they found their workstations overloaded with "cannot logon" and "Exchange communication" error messages. The Network Services folks had it even worse: the server room was a sweltering 109 Fahrenheit and filled with dead or dying servers.
At first, everyone had assumed that the Primary A/C, the Secondary A/C, and the Tertiary A/C had all managed to fail at once. But after cycling the power, the A/Cs all fired up and brought the room back to a cool 64. At the time, the "why" wasnâ(TM)t so important: the network administrators had to figure out how to bring online the four Exchange Services, six Domain Controllers, a few Sun servers, and the entire State Tax Commissionâ(TM)s server farm. Out of all of the downed servers, those were the only ones that did not come back to life upon a restart.
They worked day and night to order new equipment, build new servers, and restore everything from back-up. Countless overtime hours and nearly two hundred thousand dollars in equipment costs later, they managed to bring everything back online. When the Exchange servers were finally restored, the following email finally made its way to everyone's inbox, conveniently answering the "why"
From: ----- -----------
To: IT Department
Re: A/C constantly running.
To whom it may concern,
I came in today (Monday) to finish up a project I was working
on before our big meeting with the State ----- Commission tomorrow,
and I noticed that there were three or four large air conditioners
running the entire time I was here. Since it's a three day weekend,
no one is around, why do we need to have the A/C running 24/7?
With all the power that all those big computers in that room use, I
doubt it is really eco-friendly to run those big units at the same
time. And all computers have cooling fans anyway, so why put the A/C
for the building in that room?
I got a keycard from [the facility managerâ(TM)s] desk and shut off the
A/C units. I'm sure you guys can deal with it being warm for an hour
or two when you come in tomorrow morning.
In the future, let's try to be a little more conscientious of our
energy usage!
Thanks,
-----
As for the employee who sent it, he decided to take an early retirement.
-Daily WTF
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.
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:
If you're buying DL585's then it's likely that the applications hosted on it have a downtime costs per hour (if not minute) equal to the cost of the hardware. These are the servers that large sections of the NYSE run on for instance.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
downtime costs per hour (if not minute) equal to the cost of the hardware
No argument there, and I'm not stepping past the potential losses in terms of business impact, I'm simply pointing out that the cost of the machines themselves aren't exactly negligible (regardless of how those costs stack up compared to other costs). As you probably know, there are people within an organization who get their butts chewed when a service stops running on a box and there are also those who get their butts chewed when a piece of hardware fails. I'm saying that just because the potential loss in revenue during the outage may be higher than the cost of the box, doesn't make the thousands of dollars invested in that box immaterial, cause someone's going to have to answer for it.
Just my 2 cents.
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.
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.