Mobility & data centers – SGI Ice Cubes

By Monday, September 8, 2014 Resources, Sciences & Technology Tags: 0022, Datacenter, Infrastructure, Mobility Permalink 0
sgi_ice_cube_air sgi_icecube_truck sgi_mobirack

SGI had a full line of mobile or modular data centers. Yet we don’t find traces of these products on the actual website of the brand anymore. Does this mean that small scale, mobile or modular datacenters don’t work with big corporate clients and that tere is no real needs for that?

Some pictures here in the gallery about their different propositions. From small mobile cabinet to trucks. There are therefore and undoubtedly close links between the ideas of mobility, fragmentation or reconfiguration about data centers and the one of transportation (transportation of goods by the means of pallet, containers, boats, trains, cargos, etc.)

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Mobility & data centers – Amazon’s containers

By Monday, September 8, 2014 Resources, Sciences & Technology Tags: 0021, Datacenter, Infrastructure Permalink 0

Via Data Center Knowledge

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A Look Inside Amazon’s Data Centers

By Rich Miller

Amazon Perdix countainer.

Amazon Web Services doesn’t say much about the data centers powering its cloud computing platform. But this week the company held a technology open house in Seattle, where AWS Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton discussed the company’s infrastructure. The presentation (PDF) included an image of a modular data center design used by Amazon, which is the first official acknowledgement that the company uses modular infrastructure.

Hamilton also shared a factoid that provides a sense of the rapid growth of Amazon’s cloud platform. “Every day Amazon Web Services adds enough new capacity to support all of Amazon.com’s global infrastructure through the company’s first 5 years, when it was a $2.76 billion annual revenue enterprise,” Hamilton states in one of the slides.

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Meanwhile… The “classical” extra large data center, in 2014

By Monday, September 8, 2014 Resources, Sciences & Technology, X-Posts Tags: 0020, A, Corporate, Datacenter, Engineering, Hardware, Infrastructure, Links Permalink 0

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/

The “classical” approach to the conception of large contemporary data centers could be exemplified by Google: it usually consist of a “shoe box” (large facility with no particular architectural expression, windowless facades), surmounted by big cooling devices. That’s mainly it for the architectural side.

The Home & Personal Data(-Mining) Center

By Monday, September 8, 2014 Architecture, Resources, Sciences & Technology, X-Posts Tags: 0016, A, Data, Datacenter, Domestic, Farming, Hack, Infrastructure, Makers, Mining, Research, Tools Permalink 0
bitcoin_farming_13 home_dc bitcoin_farming_12 bitcoin_farming_11 bitcoin_farming_09 bitcoin_farming_10 bitcoin_farming_07 bitcoin_farming_08 bitcoin_farming_06 bitcoin_farming_04 bitcoin_farming_05 bitcoin_farming_03 bitcoin_farming_01 bitcoin_farming_02

Interestingly, when it comes to experimentation with hardware and The Cloud (or more generally with servers), the most interesting and almost crazy examples are made by the hobbyists and makers who are building and customizing their own data (Bitcoin) mining farms.

It happens in their houses, caves, bathrooms, bedrooms, closets, etc., it seems their are no limits to experimentation. A “house miner” even hacked his own swimming pool to cool down his servers (Portrait of a Bitcoin Miner, link below).

It is almost a subculture of home-brewed personal data-centers, built at home (or at the small office).

 

A few notable examples in pictures above (where we can verify that the questions of cooling and cables organization are for real…)

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More insane rigs:

https://99bitcoins.com/20-insane-bitcoin-mining-rigs/

http://www.thinkcomputers.org/insane-crypto-currency-mining-rigs/

 

A portrait of “Eric”, a Bitcoin miner:

bitcoin_farming_14

“Eric built a custom cooling system using water from his swimming pool.”

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043985/portrait-of-a-bitcoin-miner-how-one-man-made-192k-in-virtual-currency.html

 

And more “mining rigs” of all sorts on Google Image…