datacenter 4.0

Posted By: Adam Bomb | Dec 8th, 2008 @ 8:00 AM | 28,668 Views | 3 Comments

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By now, hopefully most people have seen Mike Manos' blog post on our next generation of datacenters, and seen the concept video of what the new datacenters will look like.
After I saw the video, I had a lot of questions about how this all works - I mean, what if it snows? How do I know my data is secure? With all your equipment in an environmentally sealed container, what do you do when a piece of equipment inside the container fails?
I was able to sit down with Christian Belady and David Gauthier, two of the architects behind the modular data center vision, to ask them some of these questions. They answered all these and more, including their thoughts on some of the other initiatives that are coming out in the industry. good stuff!

update: David and Christian have started a blog at http://blogs.technet.com/msdatacenters

Tags: data center, Green, Green Computing

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neil

This is a pretty amazing vision, and with the fact that these machines could effectively be transfered anywhere in the world ( customs aside ), you could transition them based on the price of power, network demand and potentially whether it was winter or summer.

You see birds migrating south in the winter, maybe one data you will see datacenters migrating too, to find the cool locations.

extreme

I'm curious how having the containers outside when it is hot out would save costs (assuming you don't move the containers as Neil suggested) with cooling vs. having it in a traditional enclosed space... maybe the cost for this is higher or the same as a traditional enclosed data center, but is more than made up for it by having the containers outside during the cool months?

magicalclick

Really cool. I have heard of container data center, but this video helps to understand how it is envisioned. I think the best part about it is that you only need few places to setup the containers. All the comupters are arraived at one hardware preparationg center and then you set them up in a centralized place. Instead of training people to do it or have people travel on site, you can do it in one place and have it ship to (may I say) world wide. This certainly make data center deployment a lot easier, faster, more manageable.

Really Really Nice