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Data Center Overload
theodp writes "The first rule of data centers is: don't talk about data centers. Still, the NY Times Magazine manages to take its readers on a nice backstage tour of internet data centers, convincing Microsoft and others to let them sneak a peek inside some of the mega-centers that make up today's cloud. And if it's been a while since you software types stepped inside a real-life computing facility, there's an accompanying data-center-porn slideshow that'll give you an idea where your e-mail, photos, videos, music, searches, and other online services that you take for granted these days come from."
Reader coondoggie sends in a related story about a government plan to spend $50 million on improving data center technology.
Tada tencer?
Can someone explain me why is this article called "Data Center Overload" ?
int main() { while(1) fork(); }
Now that he mentions XBL:
We here at Xbox Live make the users fiddle with hosting their own sessons and make them pay a subscribtion fee for it too! muhaha.
Problems with lag, not being able to play with many users in one session, getting everyone disconnected when the host don't want to host anymore? We don't care, we don't have to, we are XBL.
What's with the trend of calling technical info "porn"? A while ago on Wired, there was an article on "nanotech porn". It really reinforces the stereotype that tech guys are all a bunch of creepy bearded child molesters, whacking off to photoshopped images of Catherine Janeway in their mom's basement.
... welcome our new Data Center Overlord!
[ What? Oh (damn glasses), never mind. ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What do these mega data-centres use for fire suppression? I don't see obvious gas or dry-pipe systems.
We are Borg...
It had to all start somewhere. It started with "We will not be Slashdotted."
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Anyone else struck by the open-eyed naivete in this? How does this guy even grow up in the United States and this is a mystery to him? It is the profound ignorance of men like him that is most troubling - and this one is a journalist, supposedly worldly! And this fool has the clout to get Microsoft's GM of datacenters to give him a guided tour of the Xbox facility. "Look, Tommy, here's where your packets mix with those of others" "Gee willikers thanks Mr. Manos!" Is this the level journalists are at? Tourists?
We have an almost inimical incuriosity when it comes to infrastructure.
No, buddy, I think from the huge number of programs on our entertainment programs that most people find the subject highly interesting. It's just you and your journalist clique who have an incuriousity to anything not of your own small world. Please stop including me when you say "we".
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Does anyone know what datacenters do with the water that's heated? Does anyone know if there are any datacenters out there that put the heated water to good use (like this guy)?
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/06/14/magazine/20090614-search-slideshow_6.html
In the case of the one I designed it was a huge red slam button labeled "Master Shutdown" and was under a flip cover.
What overload? How is anything there supposed to be called an 'overload'?
Normally I decry bad submissions, but this one is just confusing.
Ha, no SD card slots suckas!
My new MacBook roolz...
Acid House saves Souls
My my, how Grant County really, really fucked that one up. They got it, but the county is barely seeing a dime thanks to the grotesque incompetence of the PUD and their fiber optic program...
I hope they at least have cameras or under-floor motion detectors.
for little kids. Nothing but earth movers and dump trucks and bucket loaders. 8 year old boys loved it, and the parents behind their backs would call it truck porn.
Gee whiz.
Surely this isn't the stuff democracy can't live without.
Perhaps newspaper editors don't have a clue about what people need/want to read.
Project the level of sophistication shown in this article in the glamorous Times Magazine onto stuff reporters and editors are expected to know about. Imagine the dopey insight we get about the economy, nuclear proliferation, cultural trends.
The first rule of data centers is: don't talk about data centers.
You know, for all his talk of openness, the geek can be pretty shut-mouthed at times.
Here's what real data centers look like, before the film crew shows up: http://rawiriblundell.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/cablingbefore3.jpg
and
http://rawiriblundell.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/cablingnow.jpg
... "don't talk about X" is just cover for "we don't want to show you how badly we've f*cked up".
I used to work for a major corporation that consolidated all of its redundant data centers into one location, located a few hundred feet from the Seattle Fault. Then, there's the time they discovered an electrical problem in a component of what was supposed to be a redundant power system that required a complete shutdown of that data center for several days. To replace a couple of mis-torqued bolts.
Have gnu, will travel.
In case anyone is wondering what the mysterious "NJ2" data center in Weehawken, New Jersey is, it is Savvis's Weehawken data center.
I'm pretty sure in one of those pictures they show electrical conduit and the caption says they're for cooling the equipment.
TFA claims there are 10 pictures, but I count only 9. Unless the image saying 'back to the beginning' counts as a slide. Come on NYT, we expect more from you.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Those data centers are too organized. I prefer mine to like this: http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/01/cable_mess.jpg
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
I been in a lot of big Data Centers and gone are the Mainframes they were designed for and replaced with racks of servers that throw off more heat than a hot plate!
Can I have your stuff?
I worked in many data centers of Fortune 100 companies and I've seen HUGE data centers, ones that are multi-floor and require you to practically take bicycles to get from one end to another. The pictures in these stories look like a tiny co-lo room in some data center. If you really want to see great sights and massiveness of racks there is a building in New York City, it used to be known as MFN and then renamed to the longer name Metromedia Fibre Networks at 72 9th Avenue, New York, NY that takes up the whole block from 15th to 16th Street. The building is the size of an entire city block and length of an entire avenue with at least 10-floors high and some basements also. The place is filled with data centers from all the communications companies that you could name. The place is discrete and you could never tell what is inside it and how much data runs through the place. The FBI and NSA even have their own secret facilities in there for wire tapping, I've been told. Each floor is split into huge long running rooms and the rooms a full of racks and racks of computer and communications equipment.
I worked in this building a few years ago building out an entire room for a company and once I took a walk down the hallways during a work day only to see most of these high security rooms open when technicians going in and out doing build-outs and maintenance work. Normally every room is protected by multiple access biometric security devices, hand, fingerprint, weight, ID badge, and code but on that day there was so much work going on in these rooms that the door were propped open because this was after WTC 9/11 where all places with data center space started getting rented out because so much data center space was lost after the towers collapsed and also after the surrounding buildings were damaged or made inaccessible.
The rooms were all massive and all filled with comm cables and racks of equipment. I didn't have a camera or a camera phone back in those days so I couldn't take any pictures as a keepsake but the sights were amazing. I did take some pictures of the data center that I build out to document the progression of work and I still have those pictures that make these little shots in the stories look like computer closets and not real data centers.
If you're ever in New York City and want to worship a shrine to data centers and communications visit this little building and marvel at it. The real entrance to it is in the back of the building next to StarBucks and the lobby of that entrance looks like a boring little elevator lobby to some rinky-dink place. Believe me that is the magic doorway to one of the largest data center and communications buildings on the planet.
There is Homestead Steakhouse on block down from which I only had one chance to try their fantastic but super expensive steaks after spending my holidays working in the building and across the street is the
But where's the ob. NO CARRIER?
Gotta swap tapes.
Its actually an impressive facility. solid security too.
Our stuff is in an AT&T facility. They recently jacked the rates and half the place seems to be emptying out... Everyone was shaking their heads at the "boneheaded" decision.
I actually wonder if their cooling, electrical, and backup utilities are enough to supply the massive amount of server space on the data center floor. I'm thinking they might have raised rates to clear the place out a little until they can upgrade their stuff to provide the 99.9% uptime they claim.
One client that left was spending 1 million dollars a month for their cage space.
You kids. I was a computer operator for a large insurance company in the late 1970s. We had a vast room full of mainframe gear, and a sea of hard drives, each as big as a washing machine.
Once we started the night shift "batch" jobs, those disk units would go into the spin cycle. 40 or 50 floor standing hard drives all rocking and vibrating, the entire computer room floor rumbling like the Long Island Expressway at rush hour, lights flashing, tapes spinning, reams of paper flowing like waterfalls off of line printers and a laser printer as big as a panel truck.
All you had to do was press the red 'halt' button on the system console to bring everything to an immediate, silent pause. Hit the green "run" button, and everything picked up right where it left off. For a nineteen year old kid just out of high-school, it was a form of power and control, literally at my fingertips, that I've not experienced since in any other job.
The computer was so big you could open the cabinet and stand up inside it. The system supported more than a thousand terminals over an entire statewide region using only 4MB of real memory.
Today's server racks are.... boring.
Ask Me About... The 80's!