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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. . . .
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.
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.
... "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.
From what I hear, data centers are horrible place to work-- icy cold in some areas, oppressively hot in others, and very noisy. Messes of cables, besides interfering with ventilation, and thwarting the entire purpose of designing a building around cooling needs, require an unlucky tech to periodically waste hours figuring out the wires before attempting routine maintenance.
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.
It varies over time. When I started working in data centers, almost 18 years ago, it was all halon gas, which is lethal to humans,so we all learnt the evacuation procedures pretty well! Then they moved to isolated sprinklers.... the sprinklers would only activate in the vicinity of the detected fire, thereby only destroying 2 or 3 racks rather than the whole room. Now, I think they've gone back to gas.
Serving Suggestion: Defrost
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!
I think that typically new, fancy gases are used. I've seen FM200 (http://www2.dupont.com/FE/en_US/products/FM200.html) used. For example, Internode apparently uses both FM200 (triggered by smoke) and water (triggered by heat). There's a slideshow with some info buried somewhere inside about it here: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/306254/inside_internode_data_centre
I believe that it's pretty expensive though, and that Internode facility is a very small DC compared to some of the ones discussed in the article above, so I'm not sure what they'd use.
www.fearthecow.net
I work in a smaller datacenter, it is rather uncomfortable. It's mostly hot everywhere except for the cold rows where it's fairly pleasant (temperature-wise). You can't hear much of anything over the noise of fans and stuff. Fortunately we have a small cluster of offices right next to the DC which is where I spend most of my shift.
Throughout my 28 years in construction, I've seen data centers and server rooms with gaseous fire suppression systems, water sprinkler systems. Often, they will have both, the gaseous system being useful to minimize damage to equipment, but water systems possibly to meet a fire protection code. If I've seen any trend, it is to get cheaper by only putting in pre-action sprinkle systems and forgoing the more expensive gaseous systems.
Halon has been phased out and is banned in new construction, because of its' ozone depletion and global warming concerns. It has been replaced with mostly FM200, a non-ozone depleting gaseous fire supressant. Both are lethal in high enough concentrations; since they are designed to interfere with oxygen combining with fuels they can suffocate you. Neither are particularly toxic otherwise.
Almost all sprinklers heads are "isolated" in action. They each have a fusible link that melts if it gets hot enough (usually at 165F) to release the water from that head only. The thing they do in data centers, is use pre-action systems. These have piping filled with air, and won't spray water until the pre-action valve lets the water in. That means that the head won't spray water if it's accidentally bumped open. The valve will only open if a heat/smoke detector goes off (often, only if two go off) and the water won't go anywhere unless the fusible link opens. This avoids a lot of expense from a false alarm.
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.
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