Intel Considering Portable Data Centers 120
miller60 writes "Intel has become the latest major tech company to express interest in using portable data centers to transform IT infrastructure. Intel says an approach using a "data center in a box" could be 30 to 50 percent cheaper than the current cost of building a data center. "The difference is so great that with this solution, brick-and-mortar data centers may become a thing of the past," an Intel exec writes. Sun and Rackable have introduced portable data centers, while Google has a patent for one and Microsoft has explored the concept. But for all the enthusiasm for data centers in shipping containers, there are few real-world deployments, which raises the question: are portable data centers just fun to speculate about, or can they be a practical solution for the current data center expansion challenges?"
It has to be more expensive (Score:3, Insightful)
Why it probably won't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Play games with taxes and states, too (Score:5, Insightful)
Coal mines? Hard to do it.
Hospitals? Difficult.
Big factories? Tough.
Data centers? If built into containers or container-friendly, you can start packing now
(On the other hand, it also means that data-centric companies can angle for that famous and annoying "corporate welfare" by flirting with various states and municipalities seeking better goodies like tax abatements, "free" infrastructure additions, etc.)
timothy
Why it probably will work (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess the rules are pretty much the same as for standard data centres, but since these will be looked at as a DR solution as often as not, being able to break a standard one out of the warehouse and put it online fast -- for any number of different configs -- would put it on any IT risk manager's shopping list.
Security? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now if some of the data in their included credit numbers and maybe social security numbers of employees as well then you can make money by identity theft as well.
I suppose only a minimum wage paid security guard is guarding it too so anyone with a truck and fake uniform and nametag with a bogus company name can just drive in and convince the guard to drive off with it.
Seems risky.
Perfect for greedy companies... (Score:3, Insightful)
Coming soon: Portable Oil Refineries.
Army (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Play games with taxes and states, too (Score:3, Insightful)
In the case of Sun's Black Box project it's literally a data center in a standard shipping container. You can do almost anything with that.
Here's one scenario.
Imagine a web hosting company start-up. Their goal is grow as large as a big server provider like The Planet but they don't have several million to invest and even if they did, they won't have the customers yet.
What a traditional start-up might do is rent servers from a provider and resell them. But with these portable data centers you could just rent a secured warehouse somewhere (much cheaper than building a multi-million dollar data center) and then start with ONE portable datacenter. When you get enough customers you simply stick another portable data center right next to it. Or on top of it. Or whatever.
In essence you have a modular data center that will easily scale and can be put pretty much anywhere.
I think that's what most people are missing. The summary said "mobile" whereas I think the real point is "modular". You can pick it up and drop it pretty much anywhere and it can tack on to your existing infrastructure easily etc. Or, as one video clip demonstrating Sun's Black Box said "If you fill this thing with our high end servers you've got one of the world's top 200 super computers".
Point being it just opens up so many possibilities that weren't there before.
Re:It has to be more expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
With containerized units being used as commodity infrastructure (which is increasingly easy to do with things like VMWare), this all goes away. No, it won't cover every possibility. You're still going to need somewhere to put those machines with weird cards, be they satellite connectivity, PSTN, etc. But the pure processing power portions of the DC can be kept "clean" and to spec with a few simple rules: the machines are what they are. If they break, an identical unit will be swapped back in.
Yes, it takes a different approach to server utilization, but it's one that becoming increasingly common in both large and small traditional data centers.
I'm tired of spaghetti. I'm tired of some idiot plugging both inputs of PDUs into two whips on the same generator. I'm tired of morons putting server labels over the only cooling vents on the front/back of the machine (if they even bother to label them). I'm tired of waiting for some kid at the colo facility to find a crash cart to tell me what some customer's server that has gone unreachable says on the console. I'm tired of idiots not racking machines with rails, and simply stacking a few on top of each other.
And let's face it - the guy putting his hands ont he equipment in a noisy DC is usually not the best trained or most experienced. And that's not going to change any time soon. It's simple economics.
These portable DCs are my OCD dream.
Re:It has to be more expensive (Score:3, Insightful)
I am also sick of spaghetti. The avoidance of spaghetti, alone, is a reason to pick consistent hardware manufacturers and spend the extra $500/server to get good Dell or HP systems instead of pizza boxes, and be able to rackmount them well and cable them consistently so you don't have to invent a new airflow solution for every half-rack of equipment. And if I see one more system with a side-vent or top-vent or other cutesy airflow solution that I have to stuff into a rack of normal servers, I'll scream.
By the way, for your crash cart fun and games, I've gotten extremely fond of using virtualization on an over-powered server to provide me with remote console access to the guest domain, without having to rely on the local manpower or expensive remote KVM's. You might look into it, now that it's become integral to so many distributions.