Microsoft data center trailers are tornado bait
I grew up in the Midwest, Tornado Alley, so when someone starts talking about data center trailers I automatically think tornado bait. It would be ugly to see what an F5 tornado with 300 mph winds would do to one of those things. And we’re getting right into the thick of tornado season for a lot of the country.
But people in the Great Plains aren’t the only ones that have to worry about tornadoes. According to the Insurance Journal, New Jersey actually tops the list as the state with the biggest projected losses per 1,000 square miles from tornado and related weather events. That would make me think twice about data center trailers if I were a financial firm getting ready to spread out across the Hudson River.
Beyond the tornado issue, a much more mundane disaster lurks on the horizon. Microsoft and Sun have pitched their data center in a box offerings as “lights out” environments — no staff needed. Just put it up on blocks in the front yard (or an oil platform) and let it run. But how often is somebody going to have to reboot one of those Windows servers, or worse replace them?
In a recent InfoWorld article, Microsoft’s Windows Live architect James Hamilton said companies can eliminate head-count in data centers as by switching to a “detect/reboot/replace” approach to server failure, rather than servicing malfunctioning hardware. Hamilton goes on to call Windows servers “unreliable components”.
So what happens when you have disposable servers going belly up across multiple, unmanned distributed locations? I know data center managers who can’t tell you how many servers they have running in one data center because it’s too complex. Can you imagine how hairy it could get if you had to guess which trailer needed help? It’s like a shell game.
Check out our review of the the Sun BlackBox.
Posted: April 19th, 2007 under Data center room design and site selection.
The only entities that can, or ever WILL have truly “lights out” facilities are those who have the capital, and the development muscle to create truly massive and fault tolerant systems… like Google for example. That leaves 99.99999999999% of the rest of us to have knowledgeable staff to care and feed our systems. “Lights out” is a fantasy… an “ideal world” scenario that will likely never come to pass. Unless of course they invent the error-free human and the no-fail component. Just so you know, I’m not holding my breath for either.
So the rest of us will rely on in-house staff, or managed service providers who can care for these machines and collections of code, which will continue to not work perfectly 100% of the time.
Datacenters in shipping containers is also an idea without much in the way of realism either. But that’s for a whole host of other reasons. They are fine as short-term band-aids for disaster, event-based service, and remote area use… or combinations of any/all of the above. I just don’t see any reason to build long-term solutions around them though. They are just too risky, ESPECIALLY if left unattended.
–chuck
Comment by chuck goolsbee — April 19, 2007 @ 10:27 pm
[…] If that was “All Geek to you,” collocation is nothing more complicated than putting your computer servers on somebody else’s property. Not only does it ensure that somebody with real tech savvy is there should anything go wrong, but it’s great insurance against natural disasters. Las Vegas doesn’t have a lot of hurricanes (this site is from a guy who rode out Katrina in a collocation center), tornadoes, tsunamis, or things like that. Our flash flooding problem — this fire truck was just minutes from my home and office — has been sharply reduced if not eliminated in all but the most serious of storms by a series of drainage canals under the city (these canals were a critical plot point in at least one episode of CSI). Although Nevada does have some earthquake activity, we have a lot less than California, and most of it is nowhere near Vegas. Knock on wood. NAP is an acronym for Network Access Point; a SuperNAP would be a really, really big Network Access Point! […]
Pingback by Bridget Magnus » Huge Data Center in Las Vegas — May 25, 2008 @ 4:51 pm