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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.
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?
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.
Only on slashdot does this refer to server hardware.
(At Hooters, it refers to server software).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
(At Hooters, it refers to server software).
Server firmware, please. Typically, embodied in silicon(e).
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Come sit on your grandpa's knee and I'll tell you a story.
Long before you were born, back when I was just a lad and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, there was no such thing as "digital photo-graphy". The only way to capture an image of someone or something (or "steal their soul" as we called it back then) was to use a primitive device that would capture light reflected from the target and project it on to a chemical "film", which would end up with a copy of the image embedded into it.
Later, we would take this film to an old-fashioned building known as a "drug-store" (sort of like Amazon, but you had to drive there, and sometimes you even had to interact with other people in order to purchase goods and services). We would drop off our film, it would be sent off to a magic "photo development center", and transformed into a picture printed on special photo-graphic paper.
If for some reason you didn't want to wait, you could instead take a picture with a so-called "Polaroid insta-matic camera", which had self-developing film. You would take the picture, and within seconds it would come out of the camera. However, it would still take several seconds to fully develop. Many people thought shaking the picture made it develop faster, but of course that was just silly superstition. The real way to make it develop faster was to sacrifice a goat, but few people tried that, and so were stuck with slowly developing pictures.
Now, of course, everyone has these "digital photo-graphical machines" which make Polaroids obsolete, and so soon no one will know the simple joy of shaking a Polaroid picture.
Come back tomorrow, and I'll tell you about how we had to use "floppy disk-ettes" to transfer files from one computer to another, and how we were able to dodge saber-toothed tigers using 1/2-inch tape reels.
Actually, I was wondering if this was being done in anticipation of the shakeup that will happen after the purchase... Get it? Get it? Thanks folks. I'm here all week. Try the veal and tip your waitress... :)
Bark less. Wag more.
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
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.
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.
Anonymous just because I'm to lazy to login...
The way I read it, is that the data center as a whole stayed up and functional. I'm sure it's built with enough redundancy to maintain service through a failure of a few machines/drives/switches/etc...
Not every power cord came loose, the "system" compensated, and the box kept on serving.
Now they need to test what happens when the field tech is replacing a drive right when the earthquake hits. That should be some fun watching! Does he still get the drive replaced?
Let's find out!
Real computers have more than one power cord.
Everything stayed running... the failures consisted or power cords coming out
So by "running" I think they mean "didn't break"
Redundant power cables? Although to be fair, in a real data center, KVM pushcarts and jewel cases left in partially filled racks would be a big factor in causing wire damage. Not to mention server mounting arms extending.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.