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Will Robots Take Over the Data Center?
1sockchuck writes "Robotics are beginning to be integrated into data center management, creating the potential for a fully automated, robot-driven data center. What might a robot-controlled 'lights-out' data center look like? The racks will be taller, as robotics systems can reach higher to manage servers. Robotic equipment would be mounted on rails that allow them to find and move hardware. Early examples of this are seen in tape libraries, but the concepts could be applied to other data center equipment. Amazon and Google are said to be among those looking at ways to create a fully automated data center. AOL says it has already built an unmanned data center. Data Center Knowledge looks at the challenges and opportunities in robot-controlled data centers, including how staff roles would evolve."
As long as we can still manage servers while sitting at our desks, I say go for it.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
AOL still exists?!?
typing this from the datacenter I work in, i can assure you robots will never replace 8rSta$O7qNO CARRIER
Good people go to bed earlier.
A data center with no operators for a service with no users.
This sounds nice in theory, but what is the actual rate of change/churn in large data centers once racks are populated and what are the potential labor savings over the long haul? What is the development cost of the robotic system and how long to amortize?
From: The Developers
Subject: Sorry
Body: We can replace you with a well-written shell script. Goodbye!
sudo make me a sandwich
our datacenter has lots of stairs.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"Robotic equipment would be mounted on rails that allow them to find and move hardware."
The IT tech was upset to learn the cake was a lie.
Will robots take over [x]? Yes, eventually.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Did you cry to Henry Ford about how all the buggy whip manufacturers would go out of business?
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
'Jobs' will become obsolete.
While thinking about it and preparing for that eventuality would be smart, it would get labeled as 'Socialist' by people and pundits who have no fucking clue what that means.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I for one vote for cyborg data center staff...
A data center with no operators for a service with no users.
They have users. Robot users. Bot Got Mail!
Isn't Henry Ford still dead? Or is he a zombie now?
maintenance of Chillers, UPS, Generators, ATS, ect. Have that be hands off with no on site can be bad and what if there is a fire that goes some small to big as no one is there and it takes time to trip a sensor.
Ford didn't make a device that made buggy whips better and faster without needing any people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But the transition from an economy entirely built around the labor market could be a big problem. If done well, it gives us a utopia where no-one need want for anything they desire. If done poorly, it ends in a world where a fraction of a percent of the world population control almost all the resources and the rest live in abject poverty.
Maybe we will see a "unit" in data centers which are self-contained "pods", which both Oracle and Microsoft have been mentioning, where one has it hauled in, adds power and networking, and it essentially is completely autonomous. This wouldn't work with the racks that have various different appliances, but for the common SAN/racks/enclosures/switches/routers which are the mainstay of the data center, having a "data center in a box" which can automatically spit out cards, blades, drives, or other parts might be an idea.
Only downside -- volume. It is a lot easier to have a person walk up and replace a PSU than to purchase a complete robot system for the task. Robots are not like electronics -- economies of scale that apply to solid state tech don't apply. Were this the case, you would be seeing tape silos for home use as backup appliances as a commodity item.
Businesses also have different data center needs, and there is always the upgrade path. For example, Facebook has their Open Rack specification which is 21 inches. Some equipment might be 24 inches in width, such as some IBM stuff like the POWER 795 CECs. Other equipment is 23 inches in width.
All and all, a backend robot can work with the "podular" design, but in a regular data center, it isn't that feasible/economical with today's technology. Hiring someone for $8/hour to "rack 'em and stack 'em" is pretty cheap.
Did you cry to Henry Ford about how all the buggy whip manufacturers would go out of business?
Considering how adamant Ford was about hiring shit-tons of people and paying them excellent wages as a method of ensuring his company enduring profits, I don't think he's the example you would want to use in this debate.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
But the transition from an economy entirely built around the labor market could be a big problem. If done well, it gives us a utopia where no-one need want for anything they desire. If done poorly, it ends in a world where a fraction of a percent of the world population control almost all the resources and the rest live in abject poverty.
... and using human history as a baseline, it's pretty much a given that it will be done poorly.
Good luck getting the collectivists to admit that.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
No presumption about it. A crontab job starting/stopping timed processes in a bash shell (or other suitable shell) is not a robot. A robot needs to have at least three degrees of motion [ISO 8373]. A crontab job has none.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I've been in plenty of datacenters, and I don't see where you're getting any benefit with radical redesigns. They aren't exactly designed for human comfort in the first place...
Lighting? Sure, but motion sensors mean it's only on when someone is in that area. And you'll still need lights, because humans will surely still be going in there to fix the malfunctioning robots, and hiring old coal miners seems excessive.
Temperature? No, the servers dictate the temperature the datacenter is kept at, while human comfort is completely secondary. The 15C degree air coming out of the floor vents below my KVM doesn't make for a comfortable experience, but nobody cares. Humans in the datacenter are the foreigners, who must adapt themselves, not the other way around. If Google could run their datacenters at 75C degrees, they WOULD do that now, and the humans would be sent in with ice packs strapped to their bodies.
Height? If a couple more feet of rack height were useful and cheap, I would be happy enough to keep a bit of scaffolding in my datacenter cages. As for the ridiculous heights predicted, it's not going to happen. Racks can't scale-up that easily (they'd need huge thick vertical supports to handle the weight)... and at some point, it's pretty easy to just install another "floor" for those pesky humans to walk on, install air ducts in, and also avoid the need for super-robust racks... and I can't even imagine that crazy air currents that would be happening with 100' of vertical servers pumping out crazy amounts of heat, not to mention problems like CLOUDS forming and potentially raining, INSIDE the building.
In general, the comparison needs to be made to warehouses... If Amazon/Walmart/etc. had fully-automated warehouses, I'd say automated datacenters would be just around the corner. But they don't... Humans are still very much in the loop, driving around on electrified forklifts or pallet jacks, and doing what the computer tells them to, and when. And if any business could benefit from vertical expansion, quicker response times, and less humans, it's warehousing, but it just doesn't work there, yet. That will be a lot closer to the model for future datacenters, not this pie-in-the-sky nonsense.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I mean, you look at Apple's massive data centers and there are like 4 cars in the parking lot.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
you've never seen a soda can or three at the bottom of the panel-blinking pop machine at a park or event? or videotapes all over the floor as a robot off alignment tries to set the spots for a news broadcast into the tape decks?
just wait until those are two or four terabyte drives in a bound volume at a cloud host.
because groove belts do stretch and break, and it's gonna happen as soon as everybody is out of Dodge and the guy who signed the contract has left the company for the next fat check at a new opportunity.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I have no doubt a robot can rack a server, but I'd love to see one cable or (worse) uncable one.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
"Jobs" will never be obsolete. What an odd idea - people have a deep need to work for what they have, or they don't value what they have and act quite destructively.
Low skill jobs will become obsolete. Repetitive mindless tasks, which for a long time were the source of almost all employment, will eventually be the source of almost no employment. And that's a good thing! There will still be plenty of jobs providing services for one another, which we'll perform to get the money to pay for services (and a small percentage for all the food and manufactured goods we need, which will be taken for granted).
Fewer of the world's richest people will own manufacturing and transport companies, more will own fashion companies (already a significant portion).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Robotic maintenance was considered for SAGE in the 1950s. Robots were never built for that, but the SAGE racks were designed with easy-to-handle plug-in rack modules with all connections on the back.
(Vacuum tube failure wasn't a major operational problem with vacuum tube computers. For the UNIVAC I, normal procedure was to power up the machine and set it to 10% overvoltage mode for 10 minutes. This would burn out any tubes near failure. Those were replaced, and the machine would then run for the rest of the day without another tube problem. Since the machine had a dual CPU for self-checking, any problem would cause an immediate stop.)
The datacentre of the future will be run by just one man, and a dog.
The man is there to feed the dog.
The dog is there to bite the man if he touches anything.
It's not about creature comforts, it's about error rates
Humans are imperfect, they pull the wrong drive out of the wrong server, they forget to power down before pulling, they forget to power back up afterward, they forget to set the BIOS correctly, etc.
The room for improvement is in fewer errors.
There is a bloody jumper to reset the BIOS password.
Yes, even in this digital age, sometimes a person has to connect two pieces of metal with another piece of metal. Sure a paperclip would suffice, but we are civilized creatures.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
the matrix is everywhere
Now what am I going to do with all these black T-Shirts?
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
rubbish, robot can fit a server the same way a human does. it's called tolerances, and a system where tenths of an inch of error cause self-correction of a robots actions has been done for decades.
A robot can be programmed to deal with servers of varying dimensions. As for backplane, ever heard of blade chassis?
don't need to use any square nut fastener system, there are dozens of superior alternatives including mounting systems with NO fasteners.
Will robots take over [x]? Yes, eventually.
You beat me to it. Yes, in several decades/centuries/millennia, our datacentres will be run by Robots (or the D'Jingiil, an alien race well known for getting a kick out of running datacentres and playing cards in the night shift)
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die.
*insert pithy sig here*
sounds like some thing for the MythBusters to test.
1. We still haven't standardized the dimensions of a 42u rack.
2. These days it's much cheaper to hire 10 jockey's than build even 1 piece of automated equipment, much less a robot.
3. Throw away servers, like throw away desktops, only with more economic incentive.
ok that's three.
stop sending email alerts to 2,000 people every time i reboot a freakin server. Do you realize how many processing cycles are used up just by deleting all that crap that NOBODY ever reads?
You can always see where the dead weight in a company is. People that aren't doing anything play with email. Most moderately tasked people fall back to spreadsheets. If your really high up the chain you get power point
CONFIRMED:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Assembly_Building
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Make a robot friendly chassis and things get interesting fast. The whole data center could be one giant self-healing stack. You put fresh parts in one end and take dead parts out the other.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
"The real problems will start when robots get smart enough to make us do their dirty work while they leisurely play."
Our dogs have already trained me to do that over the years. :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So you prefer that the collectivists give up so we can slide into abject poverty faster? I guess you assume you'll somehow end up being in the 0.01%.
Ideally, necessities and basics that constitute a comfortable existence would come for free. Jobs would devolve into hobbies where people trade custom hand made crafts or templates for new mas manufactured products.
People do not value 'jobs' at all in the sense of something you must do every day however odious or you get to live in a dumpster.