North American Network Operators Group

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RE: rack power question

  • From: michael.dillon
  • Date: Sun Mar 23 17:19:02 2008

> Surly we should be asking exactly is driving the demand for 
> high density computing and in which market sectors and is 
> this actually the best technical solution to solve them 
> problem.  I don't care if IBM, HP etc etc want to keep 
> selling new shiny boxes each year because they are telling us 
> we need them - do we really? ...?

Perhaps not. But until projects like <http://www.lesswatts.org/>
show some major success stories, people will keep demanding
big blade servers.

Given that power and HVAC are such key issues in building
big datacenters, and that fiber to the office is now a reality
virtually everywhere, one wonders why someone doesn't start
building out distributed data centers. Essentially, you put
mini data centers in every office building, possibly by
outsourcing the enterprise data centers. Then, you have a
more tractable power and HVAC problem. You still need to
scale things but it since each data center is roughly comparable
in size it is a lot easier than trying to build out one
big data center.

If you move all the entreprise services onto virtual servers
then you can free up space for colo/hosting services.

You can even still sell to bulk customers because few will
complain that they have to deliver equipment to three
dara centers, one two blocks west, and another three blocks
north. X racks spread over 3 locations will work for everyone
except people who need the physical proximity for clustering
type applications.

--Michael Dillon