With all of this talk lately about how to cool data centers, I’ve been thinking that data centers are actually “cool” in the other sense of the word. A decade ago, when I was at a data center down in Santa Clara, California, I distinctly remember the stark difference between the Hotmail and Google cages. Hotmail’s cages were all neat and orderly: perfect columns of servers connected by gorgeously routed cables. It was the paragon of orderly data center design. Google’s cage, on the other hand, was a seeming mess of cookie trays, hard drives, and cables. Since colocation facilities charged by the rack, Google, early on, had figured out that in order to optimize their spending, they could fit many, many more servers in the rack by removing the cases. While other companies were happy to fit a dozen servers per rack, Google was able to fit four times as many in the same space. This, of course, caused interesting new problems for the colocation facilities, who weren’t accustomed to the increased cooling and power needs of such dense clusters.
Fast forward ten years, and high density servers are now the norm, so it was great to see this video of one of Google’s current data centers. They certainly have come a long way from that original data center.
Those of us that have seen Avatar can attest to the incredible visual imagery that went into the movie, which cost $237 million to make. Datacenterknowledge has the details about the horsepower needed to do the crunching to make the movie. Situated in a 10,000 square foot server farm, the 4,000 HP BL2×200c blades sit amongst BluArc and NetApp storage, all connected by 10 Gigabit Ethernet by Foundry. 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of RAM were used to process the 240,000 frames that went into the final print of the movie. With Avatar recently clearing $2 billion in worldwide revenue, besting Titanic as the all time best grossing movie ever, movie-making will never be the same. Since showing the movie in 3D (a capability afforded by rendering the movie through super powered computers) played a huge part in the successful box office revenues for Avatar, surely powerful data centers will play a large role in many movies to come.
Finally, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz recently made waves when he tweeted a haiku resignation letter, “Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more.” So, as a bit of a fun tribute, the folks at NewScale are running a contest to find the best data center related haiku. Tweet your best data center related haiku to @CarolDirig by February 15th for a chance to win!
Who says data centers aren’t cool?
(Dennis Yang is VP of product development at Floor64, publishers of Techdirt.)
