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Sun Puts Data Center Through 6.7 Earthquake
An anonymous reader sent in a video clip showing Sun experimenting with shoving a data center through a simulated 6.7 Earthquake.
Everything stays running, but some power cords came out and some screws worked loose. It's still kind of neat to see a bunch of racks shake like a polaroid.
Wow, what a flash back in time...I watched this video at least a year or two ago....
thats what sun is spending money on before its taken over?
What hard drive survived that, that's what I'd like to know.
FUCKING HELL is that an embedded video I see in the story!? Holy shit, the geek website is ... in step with the times?
The real link to the video is in the firehose related article
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
Eh?
kind of neat to see a bunch of racks shake like a polaroid
Please stop, your turning me on.
Sweet, a link in a summary to the summary itself. Just what I've always wanted!
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
after the quake, it's still running Solaris.
of outkast, many many many times better than the black eyed peas.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
...it's so simple, beautiful, elegant, yet sometimes I wonder wtf its doing.
Solid State I'm assuming????
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
I knew there was something familiar about this. I stumbled upon it on a slow day at work a couple of years ago. The video is dated 2007 at the end.
When they can have this type of earthquake and not have any IO errors from the disks nor do any tapes fall off the walls of the inside of the tape library, then I'll call this a success. As someone that has had to retrieve a tape that was dropped by the robot of an old STK "Powderhorn", this would be a pain.
Everyone has pictures of racks sliding across the room and CRT terminals dangling from desktops. The surprising thing was how much rebooted immediately after the power returned. And even in that year the pre-web internet was more reliable than the phone company. Email worked better than many phones.
How about Hurricanes, Floods or Volcanoes. Are they covered yet?
Whatever happened to giving units along with numbers, so the numbers will actually mean somthing? I'm assuming Richter here, but as we all know assumption is the mother of all screw ups.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I think the link in the article has been slashdotted.
They've had them for a couple of years now, however the only one I've ever heard of being installed was at Stanford (and I think Sun maybe donated that one?)
Is it just me, or does the video indicate this was recorded January 17th, 1994?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Energy release by Mw6.7 Earthquake is as following.
6.7 16.2 megatons (TNT) 67.9 PJ (Joule equivalent)
See more here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale
Most things can survive Mw6.7 earthquake just fine. The question is, can it survive Mw7.0 earthquake or bigger. A earthquake that is Mw6.7 is just strong.
my manager sees this shit.
now whenever i mention colocation and its impending budget, ill have this godforsaken thing thrown in my face. important facts like "way outside its normal envelope" will fall to the wayside as superbox 9000 will solve all the companies woes, cause our shareholders to sing, and increase productivity by big number!
then, when i integrate it with both the cloud and the grid infrastructure, ill see a completely service oriented architecture designed to leverage our aging, proprietary, uncompetitive, lazy, and barely piece of suck ass assets to rocket us in direct competition with google, before we overtake microsoft!
glad they tested it, but sad it was never really emphasized the box shouldn't be guaranteed to specifications that resemble porn.
Good people go to bed earlier.
That video was posted by Sun in 2007: here
They need to test if Data Centers can survive a Myth Busters taping. Thats a REAL test.
http://www.kcra.com/cnn-news/19016582/detail.html
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
I designed a navigation display product some years ago for shipborne application (think bridge of supertankers) and we put it through a standard shake & vibe test. Everything came through fine except the video was scruzled. At first we assumed the CRTs died but upon investigation we found that the connectors on the MB ate their way through the gold fingers on the PCI video card. As electrical engineers we learned a lot of hard lessons. Shake and vibe are tough and since every system is going to have different harmonics it is hard to generalize. Simple rules of thumb and intuition may serve you poorly. In some cases shock mounts made things worse.
Every once in a while, editors get to approve the best things...
http://www.collude.biz - Ignore this, it's for Project Honey Pot.
...just outside of Seattle in 2001. Our two dozen server racks (and servers) were fine, except for the moron contractors who neglected to screw down the servers in their rack. The servers acted as battering rams and busted the door off the Compaq rack. So always take the time to get that equipment bolted down tight kiddies.
... will it blend?
and you get rickrolled. Is that better?
I noticed the racks swaying quite a lot during the test probably because they were bolted down to the floor as a standard procedure with data centers. I think that for the next design of their "black box" system they should also bolt them to the ceiling to prevent the swaying of the racks and this would probably also solve the grill damage problem seen on the top of the rack along with structural damage like buckling, bending, twisting in the body of the server racks.
The hard piping issue of using copper tube pipes for heat transfer with glycol or water might pose another problem, luckily copper is more malleable than other piping alternatives so the pipes would likely bend and deform easier before breaking or shearing due to the random motions.
This little problem of cables falling out happens in regular data centers all the time due to heat expansion/contraction creep, loose connectors, or accidental unplugging is an old problem but an easy one to fix. A little loop connector or cable-tie for the power cable mounted to the back of the case as seen on Compaq and HP server systems would take care of any cables falling out of the receptacles.
thats what sun is spending money on before its taken over?
Do you expect all development and innovation to stop the moment one mentions the word IBM? I'm glad to see Sun innovating and proving that their technology is reliable.
Funny how a million dollars worth of Engineering and R&D can look like shit when the power cord falls off...
...who has no idea what "shake like a polaroid" means? Last I knew, a polaroid was a instant camera using chemical-based films, and was not intimately connected with geological stressing.
Can someone please demonstrate what a shaking polaroid looks like so I don't feel like I'm missing out on hacker lingo.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Lol what about the poor SOB who's in that tin can doing maintenance on the server when the earthquake hits.
..just because you can, doens't mean you should...
as I was trying to figure out how to actually see the video and clicking on the link like an idiot just to get back to the same place, I figured out that a large blank space below the text is where the video is supposed to be. Since it seems it is slashdotted I cannot see it. It would be better if you could just give the link in the text so I can save it and look later and/or at least say that the video is below.
Sure, the servers survived the quake, but what of the datancenter itself ? I would not be surprised if THEIR power mains or network uplinks went to shit after such a rumble.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I saw this at least 3-4 years ago.
The tests were done in 1994 according to the video. Not exactly fresh news...
How a 7, 8, or even 9? :D
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I can't believe it. So a bunch of corporate suckers emulate an earthquake to advance their technology? In the core of Silicon Valley? Where is Spiderman?
"Hey Ya" by OutKast. Best pop song of the new millennium, haven't found anyone yet who dislikes it.
(Apart from the freaks on here who I'm sure would love the chance to dislike)
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Sure, the servers survived the quake, but what of the datancenter itself ? I would not be surprised if THEIR power mains or network uplinks went to shit after such a rumble.
The box is the center. The only hookups are hot and water lines, ethernet and power.
Dual Opteron < $600
...what they mean with Solaris on Sun being super-stable? You can shake it and it'll still run? On a more serious note... I heard about the blackbox before; I also recall reading something about other vendors doing a similar thing. I thought the almighty Google used containers in some places as well. Is there any data about how the competition is handling stuff like this? Heck, it might even be the start of a my-dick-is-bigger-than-your-dick list similar to the top 500 supercomputers list: which machine(s) can handle the most abuse?
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
When will Outkast learn:
"Do not shake or bend developing pictures."
http://www.polaroid.com/service/userguides/photographic/one600classic_ug.pdf
or
http://74.125.93.104/search?q=cache:TMzxjpjAo28J:www.polaroid.com/service/userguides/photographic/one600classic_ug.pdf+do+not+shake+site:polaroid.com&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Go back to MySpace and stay there until you learn how to speak better than a awful pop video.
So the video is already about two years old as the copyright note at the end states 2007?
Yes, Tri-X lives on, available for 55 yrs+ in 135 format. and for color reversal prints (direct positive process), Ilford CibaChrome continues under the name Ilfochrome Classic. You can still make ArT and it is still pricey.