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Military Data Center In a Suitcase To Get Commercial Release
judgecorp writes: The Mobyl Data Center, designed for the US Department of Defense, puts a data center in a rugged suitcase-sized box, and it will shortly be available commercially. The box includes up to 88 Xeon cores a maximum of 176 GB of RAM, and 2.8 TB of SSD storage with 12TB of hard disk as an option. The system uses credit-card sized MobylPC server units, sealed in epoxy, and rated to survive 300g of shock, but apparently proprietary to the vendor, Arnouse Digital Devices Corp.
Correction. The article got it wrong too. [E3845]
VM farm seedlings, I take it?
On a real note, it is an interesting application using a bunch of small form factor servers. I wonder if there is a switch between each of the nodes, so they can communicate between each other faster than 1-10GB.
Powering on these 88 Xeons sealed in Epoxy will take care of those pesky underground bunkers better than a nuke.
What is a Intel E3845 Xeon processor?
the closest thing I found is Intel® Atom Processor E3845 (Bay Trail)
http://ark.intel.com/products/78475/Intel-Atom-Processor-E3845-2M-Cache-1_91-GHz
they are running the latest version of systemd!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I can see many uses for this. Here in the midwest, where tornadoes are common, insurance companies often provide a business a discount if they physically harden their data centers. If one was to rebuild their infrastructure on one of these devices, and store it securely, I wonder if that would qualify?
What is the pricing on these things? (base or standard configuration)
I would imagine they could be an attractive option for business continuity planning, but personally as a compact, tidy and suitable for global field deployment so that in the field operations don't have to be restricted by real-time networking limitations via cellular or satellite communications, where all requests are relayed back to conventional data centres.
Why would you need a mobile data center? I can understand a mobile server, but if you think you need a mobile data center, maybe you don't understand the concept of "data center".
Any processor, much less Xenons, in Epoxy is going to get hot. Like, the epoxy is going to melt hot. Even without the epoxy, that's a huge power profile in a small space. How exactly are they going to cool that?
It is called conductive cooling...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
... until I realized that it doesn't have enough storage to serve my local porn stash.
and rated to survive 300g of shock
surely it must be 300kg?
It is unwise to ascribe motive
Depends on what your definition of a "normal person" is.
And since you've been brainwashed that "communism is evil" you can't imagine any other alternative.
The war against drugs. It will never stop.
The war against terrorism. It will never stop.*
* I'd like to see some Swordfish-style ass-kicking against terrorists.
Next up: battle armour in a suitcase, because you know some general somewhere just saw Iron Man 2.
Yea, that's great server density. But how are you going to power it? Can it run off of a standard 15/20amp Edison? What about other power standards? Yea, it is powerful, compact, and portable but if you can't power in many locations, it an expensive door stop.
No good deed goes unpunished.
The war against drugs. It will never stop.
The war against terrorism. It will never stop.*
* I'd like to see some Swordfish-style ass-kicking against terrorists.
Nonsense, any day now our troops will be marching in and occupying the capital city of the nation of "terrorism" and... oh, wait. Well, ok, any day now our glorious army will be conquering the capital city of the nation of "drugs" and their leaders will be forced to surren... oh, crap.
Ideas are sure hard to fight aren't they? It's so much easier to invade nations with capitals you can occupy and governments you can get rid of...
Each card has 2 PCIe x1 buses coming out so if you hade a host machine that had a PCIe slot, then you could run a modern GPU. Maybe even with SLI/Crossfire although I'm not sure if that's reliant on having more PCIe bandwidth. The only issue would be the degradation in bandwidth going to the card as you would be going from something like x16 (or x8 or or x4) down to x1.
Keep one of those host machines at work and one at home setup as a thin client so you can carry your core back and forth to work. Slide it into a host machine, it starts up near instantly because of the SSD and then brings up your remote workspace or even use it as an actual workstation although not sure how quick an Atom is for that. At work, you wouldn't need your own computer so if your company does hotel desks, you have a lot less to carry around. The host machine could just be one of those monitors they show.
Its not too different than those laptops that hook up to an Android phone via USB and HDMI. The real power goes into your pocket and the extra hardware can stay where it is.
Am I the only one struggling to imagine a Beowulf cluster of these? What's /. coming to?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Communism is INSTITUTIONALIZED cronyism
Breaking News: OPM Portable data center lost at airport. Was your data compromised, more at 11.
Even if you ignore the thermally conductive epoxies somebody else mentioned, simple.
Before you resin-pot the boards, you put a water-cooling heat exchanger on the chip and pipe the coolant to a radiator outside the epoxy block. Or if the thermal profile is low enough, you can do it with passive heat pipes like those inside my laptop.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Finally, I've found my new laptop...
It's about time they stopped trying to make every portable super-light and virtually powerless!
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.