Container Data Center

Building data centers in Afghanistan

A couple weeks ago I got the chance to spend the morning with Paul Brenner, who works in the high-performance computing department at the University of Notre Dame. Brenner is spearheading a project to build a containerized data center next to a local municipal greenhouse so that, during winter months, the heat from the servers can be piped into the greenhouse to warm it up. Check out the Notre Dame greenhouse data center story (there’s a cool video).

Another thing I learned from Brenner when hanging out with him is that he is an engineering officer in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, and actually just returned from an overseas deployment in Afghanistan a few weeks ago. While there, Brenner helped build data centers.

Obviously it’s not an ideal place, and Brenner had to do a lot of improvising. A few things complicated his mission. First, with it being the military, so much information is siloed, with select people able to access it. So not only do different branches of the military want their own data centers and their own servers, but divisions within each branch want close control of their IT assets. So a lot of data centers there are hodgepodge, small, and consist of a rack here or a rack there.

Brenner mentioned how some of the major IT vendors out there, such as IBM and HP and Sun Microsystems, have tried pitching their containerized data centers as a suitable option for military operations. But Brenner said that even in ideal conditions, deployment time is measured in months. In many cases, Brenner doesn’t have that much time.

So he made do. Oftentimes he would take a bunch of household air-conditioning units and daisy-chain them together, which he said actually led to a good deal of cooling redundancy. It’s all about adjusting to conditions, and when your overseas serving your country in a barren desert land, you do whatever you can to keep the computers running.

Sorting through the Google data center summit hype

Over the past week, there has been a lot of discussion online regarding the Google data center energy summit held at the company’s Mountain View facility last week. In particular, there has been a flurry of activity pointing to a video tour inside a Google container-based data center. Let’s step back and take a look at what information was actually new, however.

Container-based data center

Google confirmed what everyone already knew — that the company has a container-based data center. Robert X. Cringely reported this back in November 2005, so it’s not exactly news. But it’s the first time Google actually confirmed the rumors and showed a sneak peek inside. You can take a look at the video below, taken by Data Center Knowledge:

Pretty cool stuff. But as James Hamilton, an engineer at Amazon, wrote in a recent blog post, it’s interesting to note that Google built this container-based data center, but then never returned to that design. In fact, Hamilton thinks that the data center design isn’t optimized for shipping containers: Continued »

Microsoft rolls out container data center strategy for cloud computing

Say goodbye to chillers and CRAC-units, say goodbye to raised floors and traditional disaster recovery. And say hello to the new paradigm, courtesy of Microsoft’s data center team.

Microsoft’s goal in 2008 was to shake up the data center community in a big way, starting with Mike Manos’ announcement at AFCOM that Microsoft would be deploying containerized data centers, to Christian Belady’s “Data center in a tent” experiment with a PUE of 1.0. Mission accomplished.

These guys are pushing the envelope like no one else in the industry — rabble rousing at ASHRAE TC 9.9 meetings, calling out vendors, and blogging about it every chance they get. They’re literally scaring people who have built their reputation and businesses on traditional data center design — and I don’t just mean the people selling chillers and raised flooring. These engineers are mad scientists, flipping their noses at decades of conventional wisdom.

You can read Microsoft’s proposal for yourself at Mike Manos’ blog, but the basic concept is this: data center trailers with minimal building envelop, using unconditioned outside air to cool servers. The servers will run on outside air with temperatures ranging 10-35 C and 20-80% relative humidity. “For this class of infrastructure, we eliminate generators, chillers, UPSs,” Belady wrote in the blog.

Here is a video:

Video: Microsoft Generation 4.0 Data Center Vision

The applications these servers are supporting have a built-in failover, Microsoft calls it “geo-redundancy”. If the server (or servers) die, the application automatically shifts over to another batch of servers, and Microsoft technicians replace the servers on a maintenance schedule.

For applications that demand higher redundancies, Microsoft will build more robust infrastructure. But thanks to its chargeback program, Microsoft’s business units will be less likely to adopt the more expensive higher-redundancy configurations if they can prove the bare bones approach works.

Microsoft doesn’t want you to put your data center in a tent. If you want to run big iron, have redundant components, pay big bucks for people to babysit your servers and keep them cool, that’s your business.

But they do want you to know that they plan to run all of their data centers at 1.125 PUE by 2012.

Next Microsoft Data Center Experience to be in Chicago

Microsoft has announced that its next Data Center Experience (MDX) event, to be held next year, will be in Chicago, with a chance for customers to check out its container-based data center, which is still in the works.

This year the event was in San Antonio, and gave a couple hundred Microsoft customers the opportunity to mix and mingle with Microsoft data center folks, and take a tour of their data center down there.

The post also mentions how the container-based data center in Chicago has now moved into the testing phase. Michael Manos, the general manager of data center services for Microsoft, wrote more about Microsoft’s Chicago data center this week. Here are a couple good paragraphs from Manos’ post:

I have watched with much interest the back and forth on containers in the media, in the industry, and the interesting uses being proposed by the industry. The fact of the matter is that Containers are a great “Out of the Box Paradox” that really should not be terribly shocking to the industry at large.

The idea of “containment” is almost as old as mechanical engineering and thermodynamics itself. Containment gives you the ability to manage the heat or lack thereof more effectively in individual ecosystems. Forward looking designers have been doing “containment” for a long time. So going back to the paradox that “out of the box, is in the box thinking” shift, the concept is not terribly new.  It’s the application at our scale and specifically to the data center world which is most interesting.

Hat tip to John Rath at Data Center Links for the pointer to the LiveSide.net blog.

HP’s POD data center container selling point is the supply chain

The HP Performance Optimized Data Center (POD) is essentially a me-too product, following on the heels of Sun’s Project Black Box and Rackable’s ICE cube. But a recent post from Gordon Haff at Illuminata about the HP POD containerized data center makes a good case for HP’s offering. Haff brought up a great point I hadn’t seen in other coverage of the new Hewlett-Packard data center trailer thus far.

Haff says HP’s strengths are in volume server design and supply chain, “And that’s the reason HP is likely to be as successful with this type of product as anyone—if not more than most… It’s the IT gear within the container, how it’s delivered, how it’s serviced, and how it’s upgraded that matter most to potential customers.”

In recent articles, HP execs have positioned the POD as a way for companies running out of data center space to add capacity quickly, reducing the time it takes to build out brick-and-mortar space.

If data center managers are looking for on-demand capacity, then a company like Sun might not be the best option. While the Sun Modular Data Center has all the engineering bells and whistles of the HP POD, can you afford to rely on a company that’s had serious hardware supply chain issues when you’re in a capacity crunch?