Data centers in a box
Nick Carr’s blog recently reported on the current trend to package servers in shipping containers.
In this case, Microsoft plan to put 220 (wow!) shipping containers into the first floor of a new data centre. The past reports I have seen on using shipping containers as a means of packaging up chunks of data center have focussed on the benefits of being able to drop them off in a car park. The idea of manoeuvring them into a building seems a little challenging, as does the thought of swapping one out when it needs replacing, but I’m sure it’s all good fun.
What problem is packing servers into shipping containers intended to solve? This is a new data center build, so it is not simply a means of quickly providing additional capacity for a data center that is bursting at the seams.
You may be as surprised at the answer as I was. NickCarr’s blog links to an interview with Michael Manos and Christian Belady.
Belady, one of the Microsoft guys, explained that “One of the things we like about them is we can take a bunch of servers and look at the output of that box and look at the power it draws. At the end of the day, we can determine, “What is the IT productivity of that unit?”
To my mind, this is a pretty startling indictment of the current state of play in data centres. If you really have to put your servers into containers in order to be able to answer these kinds of questions, then you definitely have a problem.
As Martin McEvoy has already explained in an previous entry in this blog, not knowing what you have is a bad thing for lots of reasons, not least the possibliity of liability.
But is containerisation the solution? While it has its place, I am not quite convinced that people are ready to restructure their data center into a pile of shipping containers, presumably helpfully labelled “email”, “ERP”, “Website” and “HR”.