Mike Manos on Data Centers

Posted By: Adam Bomb | May 21st, 2008 @ 12:01 AM | 13,147 Views | 2 Comments

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Every time I talk with Mike, I come away with a new appreciation for what it means to manage a big data center. I used to think a 20,000 machine installation was big, but Mike can add that many servers in a month. Mike's been busy on the conference circuit lately talking about green datacenters, and he's been vocal about the recent move Microsoft made to container-based data centers. In our Chicago facility, a truck drives up and drops off a 40' shipping container, preloaded with 2000 servers. The container is plugged in to Ethernet, power, and cooling and is ready to power on and go. Mike has a nice animated tour of the facility that he shows around the 10 minute mark. He also talks about the challenges of measuring efficiency in the data center and deciding when is the right time to virtualize workloads. You can keep up with Mike's adventures in data center on his blog.

Tags: datacenter, Green

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neil

So my big question has to be how you name all these machines and bring them into the network?

If you are adding 2000 machines at a time, there need to have a pretty clear plan for this.

Finally do you open the containers in machines go bad, say once a month and replace the bad ones, or just leave them there in a dead state?