Data Center Overload 88
theodp writes "The first rule of data centers is: don't talk about data centers. Still, the NY Times Magazine manages to take its readers on a nice backstage tour of internet data centers, convincing Microsoft and others to let them sneak a peek inside some of the mega-centers that make up today's cloud. And if it's been a while since you software types stepped inside a real-life computing facility, there's an accompanying data-center-porn slideshow that'll give you an idea where your e-mail, photos, videos, music, searches, and other online services that you take for granted these days come from."
Reader coondoggie sends in a related story about a government plan to spend $50 million on improving data center technology.
Cada Denter? (Score:2)
Tada tencer?
Data Center Overload (Score:1)
Can someone explain me why is this article called "Data Center Overload" ?
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If it had been called "Data centers. What's up with those then?", you probably wouldn't have read it.
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Actually I'm pretty bored so I would have read anything remotly related to data centers.
But now I'm just disappointed.
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Quantum entanglement between me [ozzu.com] and Soulskill.
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Maybe I'm spoiled, but I've seen much bigger, denser datacenters. I have some pictures that I'm not suppose to have. This looked like a fairy tame facility, nothing I'd be impressed by.
Try Equinix Ashburn VA, Equinix Chicago, Level3 New York, One Wilshire Los Angeles, or a dozen others that I've been in that I don't feel like listing out right now. These pictures could have been out of any of dozens of mom and pop datacenters I've been in around the country. If you were sta
Re:Data Center Overload (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe you have but I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die. Wait, what?
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Is this to be an empathy test? Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil. Involuntary dilation of the iris...
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Probably not. But you should avoid eating lunch there again. Oh, and make your way to the nearest bathroom as fast as you can, you're about to make a serious mess.
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Can someone explain to me why journalists continue to try to find obscure references for comparison?
"Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than Sweden."
This sentence while having some sort of dramatic effect tells the reader nothing. How many Swedens does Norway use? The US? Russia? Japan? Not to mention if you try to factor for the reality that there are data centers in Sweden using power.. are they eliminated from the Sweden unit and added to the worldwide data center total or are the
We don't need no stinking datacenter (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that he mentions XBL:
We here at Xbox Live make the users fiddle with hosting their own sessons and make them pay a subscribtion fee for it too! muhaha.
Problems with lag, not being able to play with many users in one session, getting everyone disconnected when the host don't want to host anymore? We don't care, we don't have to, we are XBL.
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It always amazes me the number of MS apologists out there that think that behaving in that sort of thuggish, unprofessional fashion is OK.
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The mice are not bad. But that's as far as I'd go, I think.
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MS natural keyboards are excellent IMO, since they are a great balance of ergonomics versus price and a familiar enough layout. I wish they had put as much thought into their software. The only two things I have bought from MS (for my own use) in the past ten years are two keyboards; They've worked quite nicely with my various Linux machines.
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I'm totally sorry I don't make purchasing decisions based on your experiences and opinions. It's terribly self-centered of me to consider my own thoughts ahead of yours on matters that have no effect on you.
Of course it would help if I could distinguish you from about 7 billion other people' but I can't. Until that's rectified, I'm afraid you don't count.
Data center "porn"? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's with the trend of calling technical info "porn"? A while ago on Wired, there was an article on "nanotech porn". It really reinforces the stereotype that tech guys are all a bunch of creepy bearded child molesters, whacking off to photoshopped images of Catherine Janeway in their mom's basement.
Re:Data center "porn"? (Score:4, Insightful)
The term implies lack of substance, focus on looks and removedness from real-world scenarios. That is what these slideshows are. There's very little information in them, important details are not shown because they're not visually intriguing and what is shown has almost nothing to do with what it's like to work in a data center (or what scientists working on nano technology are actually doing).
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It also makes it harder to view the articles at work, especially when you have to explain why the word shows up in your proxy logs...
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We're trying to desensitize the porn sensors. In a few years, you'll won't have to worry about machine generated nsfw tags.
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Not to mention the inanity of using the word "cloud". This also suggests that tech guys are a bunch of dumb, unthinking, corporate drone, buzzword-spouting jerks. Whereas, in fact, we all now that's marketin
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Not to mention the inanity of using the word "cloud". This also suggests that tech guys are a bunch of dumb, unthinking, corporate drone, buzzword-spouting jerks.
This is a revisionist load of horseshit. The cloud represented the internet and all its myriad services on network diagrams long before anyone started talking about it for distributed computing. It's like claiming that only newbies put the dollar sign in Micro$oft, which completely ignores the long tradition as represented in geekery with Compu$erve.
"Cloud" is no worse a term than any other. It's clear, however, that anyone who would talk about an information superhighway needs an ass-kicking.
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The cloud represented the internet
[citation needed]. This usage is completely new to me, despite being in the iIternet, since it was reachable from Germany, and being on BBSes, long before that.
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What's with the trend of calling technical info "porn"?
It's only a trend if you've been living in a cardboard box somewhere in Outer Mongolia for the last decade and some... (And it's not just 'techie' stuff either. I first heard the term 'foodie porn' back in the mid 90's.)
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Don't be so sensitive. The usage is pretty common in media, like the food channel dishing out "food porn", etc.
Who the hell is this Catherine, btw?
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"Who the hell is this Catherine, btw?"
Never mind. Get out a bit and reign in your paranoia.
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Well, their innards are showing. The servers I mean, they're naked. Like C3PO in SW1!
I, for one, ... (Score:3, Funny)
[ What? Oh (damn glasses), never mind. ]
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to me it's beter like this:
I, for one, welcome our new Data Center Overload.
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I think that typically new, fancy gases are used. I've seen FM200 (http://www2.dupont.com/FE/en_US/products/FM200.html) used. For example, Internode apparently uses both FM200 (triggered by smoke) and water (triggered by heat). There's a slideshow with some info buried somewhere inside about it here: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/306254/inside_internode_data_centre [computerworld.com.au]
I believe that it's pretty expensive though, and that Internode facility is a very small DC compared to some of the ones discussed in t
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Halon has been phased out and is banned in new construction, because of i
In the Beginning (Score:2)
We are Borg...
It had to all start somewhere. It started with "We will not be Slashdotted."
Some people's small world (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone else struck by the open-eyed naivete in this? How does this guy even grow up in the United States and this is a mystery to him? It is the profound ignorance of men like him that is most troubling - and this one is a journalist, supposedly worldly! And this fool has the clout to get Microsoft's GM of datacenters to give him a guided tour of the Xbox facility. "Look, Tommy, here's where your packets mix with those of others" "Gee willikers thanks Mr. Manos!" Is this the level journalists are at? Tourists?
We have an almost inimical incuriosity when it comes to infrastructure.
No, buddy, I think from the huge number of programs on our entertainment programs that most people find the subject highly interesting. It's just you and your journalist clique who have an incuriousity to anything not of your own small world. Please stop including me when you say "we".
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Should be entertainment channels. Unlike some people, I don't have a professional editor checking my work.
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Re:Some people's small world (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes, the journalist was a tourist.
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I agree with this sentiment. Some of the dumbest commentary I have ever read are from those that style themselves professional investigators. No wonder they are going out of business; they are the stupidest people in the room, so no one finds what they have to say illuminating. And therefore it has no value.
I soothe myself thinking that the journalists are actually smarter than they write; they are just writing down to their audience. I'm not sure I believe that, though. I think many are just creature
Reuse? (Score:2)
Does anyone know what datacenters do with the water that's heated? Does anyone know if there are any datacenters out there that put the heated water to good use (like this guy [thebuehls.com])?
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waste heat is dumped to the outside world
That's the part I'm talking about. Seems like that heat could be put to good use somehow.
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waste heat is dumped to the outside world
That's the part I'm talking about. Seems like that heat could be put to good use somehow.
There are projects in that direction, though they dont tend to be big news except getting a mention when New Scientist run a "green issue". The problem though is that the energy involved is often not enough to be particularly significant once you consider how much is left after the conversion and transportation processes needed to make use of it elsewhere.
There are various ways the energy can be used if you get beyond the "not enough to be genuinely useful once you've transported and processed it" problem.
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I remember that one, great idea but personally I would never dare to do that except if the cooling water was a closed loop with some sort of heat exchange.
I played with watercooling my pc some years ago before I got a laptop and it was great fun and many ways to keep your computer quiet.
I made a combination of passive and active cooling. The outside radiator(this one in a larger version http://www.highspeedpc.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/Konvgroup2.jpg [highspeedpc.com] ) could keep the CPU and GPU cool when not gaming, a
Every server center has one of thee (Score:2)
In the case of the one I designed it was a huge red slam button labeled "Master Shutdown" and was under a flip cover.
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Have you ever been tempted to press the Jolly candy-like button [youtube.com]?
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Have you ever been tempted to press the Jolly candy-like button?
Have any of you ever actually pushed one? There is a surreal reverse-woosh as everything shuts down simultaneously, followed by an eerie pin-drop silence...
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Overload? (Score:2)
What overload? How is anything there supposed to be called an 'overload'?
Normally I decry bad submissions, but this one is just confusing.
I knew it (Score:2)
Ha, no SD card slots suckas!
My new MacBook roolz...
Ah, the datacenter in Quincy (Score:2)
I like the 'secure cages' (Score:1)
I hope they at least have cameras or under-floor motion detectors.
And we're surprised newspapers are going broke? (Score:1)
Gee whiz.
Surely this isn't the stuff democracy can't live without.
Perhaps newspaper editors don't have a clue about what people need/want to read.
Project the level of sophistication shown in this article in the glamorous Times Magazine onto stuff reporters and editors are expected to know about. Imagine the dopey insight we get about the economy, nuclear proliferation, cultural trends.
The three monkeys (Score:2)
The first rule of data centers is: don't talk about data centers.
You know, for all his talk of openness, the geek can be pretty shut-mouthed at times.
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From what I hear, data centers are horrible place to work-- icy cold in some areas, oppressively hot in others, and very noisy. Messes of cables, besides interfering with ventilation, and thwarting the entire purpose of designing a building around cooling needs, require an unlucky tech to periodically waste hours figuring out the wires before attempting routine maintenance.
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Sometimes ... (Score:2)
... "don't talk about X" is just cover for "we don't want to show you how badly we've f*cked up".
I used to work for a major corporation that consolidated all of its redundant data centers into one location, located a few hundred feet from the Seattle Fault [wikipedia.org]. Then, there's the time they discovered an electrical problem in a component of what was supposed to be a redundant power system that required a complete shutdown of that data center for several days. To replace a couple of mis-torqued bolts.
NJ2 (Score:3, Informative)
Those aren't cooling conduits (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure in one of those pictures they show electrical conduit and the caption says they're for cooling the equipment.
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Right. Those were definitely electrical conduits, likely with a substantial amperage available if you shorted them.
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I also had to laugh at the caption that went with the pretty array of blue network cable and red connectors: "Data centers run enormously scaled software applications with millions of users." Well good. That's why we're looking at a patch panel then?
Slide Counting Fail (Score:2)
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You are expecting them to actually check their sources?
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I noticed this the very first time I ever viewed a NYT slideshow. It is consistent across them all - there is always one less slide than the total given at the top right.
Too clean (Score:1)
Way to neat inside??? (Score:1)
not nearly as cool as the old mainframe days (Score:2)
Once we started the night shift "batch" jobs, those disk units would go into the spin cycle. 40 or 50 floor standing hard drives all rocking and vibrating, the entire computer room floor rumbling like the Long Island Expressway at rush hour, lights flashing, tapes spinning, reams of paper flowing like waterfalls off of li