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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.
Hard drives are not as fragile as you might think. I was running our tiny company's "data center" (3 consumer '486s, two HDs each, screwed down to a metal rack bolted to the wall) 35 miles from Northridge during the 6.75 Northridge quake.
Didn't lose a single drive.
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.
Instamatic was Kodak's cartridge loading technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instamatic), not Polaroid.
Each company's products evolved through many generations. Large cartridges, small cartridges, flash cubes, flash bars, wet developer/fixer, dry process. We gave my dad a Polaroid SX-70 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-70) when it first came out. Something very satisfying about the whirr and thunk of the ejection mechanism. The batteries were contained in the film cartridge.
I recall some Japanese tourists stopping him to take a look at the camera - this may have been the last cool technology that the U.S. saw before Japan.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/02/17/polaroid.warns.reut/index.html
In older cameras, there was no protective plastic cover, the chemicals were exposed to the air, and shaking or blowing on the picture would make it dry faster.
In newer cameras, there is a protective plastic cover, the chemicals are not exposed to the air, and shaking will not cause it to dry faster.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I've read that some hard drive use a magnetic stabilisation inside, a little like the digital cameras who moves the sensors along with the user movement, thus, if the hard drive is powered, it can sustain bigger vibrations without being damaged.
True, but I've had several hard drives from MANUFACTURER_A which have been dropped several feet (while off) onto both hard tile and carpeted floors, and get plugged in and work fine for years. Another, while on, took a three foot fling/tumble when my notebook satchel slipped from my arm (I hadn't realized I left the computer on), and it survived.
Then I went to MANUFACTURER_B, and a turned off computer with a minitower case slipped and fell on it's side, and the drive died (a few other similar, relatively low impatct collisions with these drives had similar effect).
A third manufactuer was similar to the first in my experience. Then there was a fourth that worked great, except at the slightest hint of shock, they started making crazy noises from then on (they worked, but if a drive starts making noises all of a sudden like that, you can't really trust it).
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
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.
Real computers have more than one power cord.
There's no room for a KVM pushcart in the Sun Modular Datacenter.
All sun servers, new ones anyway, have an integrated lights out management card (ILOM) that you would use instead of a KVM switch. It allows you to connect to the server, even if it's powered off.
If you were putting this in a seismic zone I would assume you would install some rack drawers if you would have small objects such as jewel cases so you wouldn't have them just laying around. The design of the unit doesn'nt seem to have any shelves, or things you could use as a shelf to put these items on anyway.
The racks are put in the container sideways and there is a side panel. The rack slides out into the aisle if you need to service anything in the rack.
I posted a link to this video on the previous thread on the new Internet Archive Data Center that used one of these modular data centers. I guess someone found it interesting and didn't notice how old it was.
Dual Opteron < $600