Data Center

Overheard: Datacenter in a box coming to a batcave near you

“Sun and a consortium of other businesses are going to lower Blackbox self-contained computing facilities into a Japanese coal mine to set up an underground datacentre, using up to 50 percent less power than a ground-level datacentre.” Chris Mellor, Sun to set up datacentre in coal mine

Sun Microsystems promoted their ”datacenter in a box” concept earlier this year. The datacenters are basically 20-foot shipping containers with racks of pre-configured servers and storage. The idea is that you’d be able to build a datacenter as big as you need because the Blackboxes are modular units — and because they’re self-contained shipping containers, you could ship them  just about anywhere – including outer space.  

When I first read about Project Blackbox, I was thinking military.  But I hadn’t thought about using caves and abandoned mines for commercial use. Genius.

In the Japan project, the coolant is going to be ground water — a little controversial, but they’re working on getting away from water altogether.  Since the cave’s temperature is a constant 59 degrees F,  the cost of running the underground center is expected to be $9 million less than if it were above ground.  

Overheard: Rackspace chiller must have given him nightmares

Since the recent Dallas/Fort Worth data center downtime event, we have been doing a lot of communicating with our customers. Lanham Napier, CEO The Cause, The Response and The Timeline

Without notifying us the utility providers cut power, and at that exact moment we were 15 minutes into cycling up the data center’s chillers. Our back up generators kicked in instantaneously, but the transfer to backup power triggered the chillers to stop cycling and then to begin cycling back up again—a process that would take on average 30 minutes. Those additional 30 minutes without chillers meant temperatures would rise to levels that could irreparably damage customers’ servers and devices. We made the decision to gradually pull servers offline before that would happen. And I know we made the right decision, even if it was a hard one to make.

A chiller is a cooling system that removes heat from one element and deposits into another element. For instance it could remove heat from water and disperse it into the air. A chiller is also a very scary story that can give you nightmares and keep you up at night.

 Rackspace delivers enterprise-class web infrastructure and managed hosting services. They have six data centers and manage more than 22,000 servers.

Overheard: What is a pre-green bill?

“Get a copy of your company’s electric bill. Determine how much you actually spend per month in energy for your data center. This is considered your “pre-green” bill.” Jimmy Ray Purser 5 Easy, Cheap Ways to Green Your Data Center

How do you actually do that?