Entries tagged with datacenter - TechNet Edge

Mike Manos on Data Centers

AdamBomb — Wed, 21 May 2008 07:01:00 GMT

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.

CommNet: the portable datacenter

AdamBomb — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:47:00 GMT

The communications network at conferences has become so ubiquitous that I've never really stopped to think about what goes in to putting it in place. Chris Craig is running CommNet here at MMS, and he was kind enough to take us deep into the bowels of the Venetian to show us the racks that provide the infrastructure and tell us a little about what it takes to put together the infrastructure for a show like this. These guys come in the weekend before a show, set up the the network for hundreds of machines used in a show for labs, evals, etc., make sure everything is running and tested, all in just a couple of days. Right after the show, they pull it all down and send it off to the next show's venue.

Chris gives us a breakdown of what it takes to build, and shares some war stories about running the network.

Robots in the Data Center?

AdamBomb — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:01:00 GMT

We were really excited when the Robotics Research team approached us to debut their latest piece of technology. We've seen robots used extensively in manufacturing and other industries, but this is the first time we've seen general purpose robotics put to use in IT.
David got the full scoop and product demo directly from the research team.
Truly revolutionary work. Can't wait to see one in every datacenter.
(hopefully, you've realized that this video is a joke. April Fools!)

Doing IT Green

AdamBomb — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:10:00 GMT

IT Forum in Barcelona included a panel of industry representatives sharing their thoughts on 'going green' in the datacenter. I managed to catch up with a couple of these guys, Nigel Bridgeman of HP and Michael Manos from Microsoft to ask them about the panel and what their respective companies are doing to make data centers more environmentally sustainable.
This is a topic I've really started to become passionate about, and I'm curious to hear what you think - would more features on Green Computing be interesting to you? What are you doing to make your own computing more environmentally friendly?