Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
On one occasion a disk unit started giving "media error warnings" but apart from that no ill effects again.
Understandable. I once watched a cricket match, and pretty much the same thing happened to my brain.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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.
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
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.
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