{"id":1095,"date":"2008-04-01T13:40:44","date_gmt":"2008-04-01T19:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1095"},"modified":"2008-04-01T13:40:44","modified_gmt":"2008-04-01T19:40:44","slug":"doublewide_how","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1095","title":{"rendered":"Double-wide? How about 220-wide?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grab a ratty lawnchair and put a case of Busch cans in the cooler because the data center has now officially become the trailer park.<\/p>\n

Poindexter, meet Jethro.<\/p>\n

Both Sun<\/a> and Rackable<\/a> introduced supercomputers-in-shipping-containers some time ago, but it’s a move by Microsoft that pushes the trend into the mainstream. In its mammoth new data center in Chicago, reports<\/a> Rich Miller, “Microsoft will forego a traditional raised-floor environment … and will instead fill one floor of the huge facility with up to 220 shipping containers packed with servers.” The “bold move,” says Miller, “is an affirmation of the potential for containers to address the most pressing power, cooling and capacity utilization challenges facing data center operators.” In designing the Chicago facility, Microsoft consulted with parking lot operators to ensure that semitrucks would be able to drive into the center and drop off the containers.<\/p>\n

Microsoft’s Michael Manos made the announcement in a speech today in Las Vegas. That seems like the perfect choice of venue. Despite all the glitz, Vegas is still a trailer-park town at heart.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: There’s more on the data center philosophy of the ‘Soft Boys in this interview<\/a> with Manos and one of his colleagues. On the attraction of containers: “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? How many search queries were executed per box? How many emails sent or stored?’ You can get into some really interesting metrics. A lot of people say you can’t look at the productivity of a data center, but if you compartmentalize it – not as small as the server level, but at some chunk in between – you can measure productivity.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grab a ratty lawnchair and put a case of Busch cans in the cooler because the data center has now officially become the trailer park. Poindexter, meet Jethro. Both Sun and Rackable introduced supercomputers-in-shipping-containers some time ago, but it’s a move by Microsoft that pushes the trend into the mainstream. In its mammoth new data […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}