Little mobile “datacenters” (cabinets)

By Wednesday, September 17, 2014 Resources, Sciences & Technology Tags: 0029, Datacenter, Hardware, Infrastructure, Mobility Permalink 0
Avnet Mobile Data Center Solution (2013), side view. Avnet Mobile Data Center Solution (2013), front view. Elliptical Mobile Solutions products. R.A.S.E.R. HD (left), R.A.S.E.R. DX (middle) and C3-S.P.E.A.R. (two variantions on the right). Elliptical Mobile Solutions products. R.A.S.E.R. DX. Elliptical Mobile Solutions products. Suite of R.A.S.E.R. DX.

Other projects that seem worth mentioning are these mini mobile, “all in one” modular units that look very infrastructural. The Mobile Data Center Solution by Avnet was launched in 2013, the C3 – S.P.E.A.R. by Eliptical Mobile Solution too (which seems to serve as the base for the Avnet one btw).

Besides their small size and their obviously mobile and versatile dimensions, I’m interested about them because of their rather unusual, robust industrial aspect, designed to me moved often with forklifts (Eliptical Solution) or by hand (Avnet). Not related to technology, they do make me rather think of some sort of professional cleaning devices for medium sized industrial areas, or possibly and more interestingly the carts of ice cream sellers (Avnet) or, of course, about air conditioning machines (E.M.S.)

Avnet about the Mobile data Center Solution: ” Based on EMC VSPEX reference architecture, this innovative new solution is available exclusively through Avnet for U.S. and Canadian partners to create private clouds for customers who need to rapidly deploy data centers to support business continuity, disaster recovery, large-scale events as well as remote field locations.”

(Of course, we are aware that anybody, including us, could put together a few server blades in a flight case cabinet and pretend it to be a small mobile data center! Which it would be).

The 19 inches rack

By Thursday, September 11, 2014 Resources, Sciences & Technology Tags: 0025, Cabinets, Hardware, Links, Standards Permalink 0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19-inch_rack

The 19″ rack as a long story and like most “normalized” artifacts, some of its dimensions are inherited by past uses/components (telephony?), some of which are not used anymore.

The 19″ rack is globally used as a standardized server enclosure (or computer cabinet) in data centers. Build in steel and usually heavy, it is nonetheless designed to be mobile (mounted on wheels and easily packable on pallet and/or within containers for transportation). This massive use leads to the common esthetic of the data center, with straight lines of cabinets containing multiple servers. A 19″ rack usually do the same thing at a very small size than a full data center: it physically protects servers, organizes their dispatching in a very rational way and control air flows & climate/temperature.

We cannot speak about servers cabinet without mentioning the other normative unit that structure them: “U“. A “U” is a rack unit that describes the height of the equipments within the rack.

The mobile & expandable data center: containers and other ideas

By Wednesday, September 10, 2014 Resources, Sciences & Technology Tags: 0024, Corporate, Datacenter, Engineering, Hardware, Ideas, Infrastructure, Mobility Permalink 0
Microsoft Windows Azure datacenters. Containers with their own cooling unit into large industrial halls. Sungard's mobile center (truck). Ecopod pavilion by HP. Ecopod module with it own integrated cooling devices by HP. Microsoft "roofless" data center, Boydton, Virginia (2013). The "parking lot" model. Sun's modular data center, also known as project "blackbox" (2007). Another variant of the shipping coutainer. Unknown. Cisco data center inside shipping containers, with visible cooling devices (2011). Ebay, in the same way as Amazon, Microsoft, HP, Sun, Cisco and others.

As we were speculating in our I&IC – Preliminary intentions about a very versatile/mobile and distributed versions of the cloud infrastructure (datacenters), almost a physical bittorrent so to say, we are interested into the existing versions of mobile data centers.

Obviously, many manufacturers and global brands have indeed thought about (infinitely ?) expandable datacenters. The parking lot — enclosed or not — combined with the containers storage system seems to be the leading model for that type of approach. Maybe should they instead resurrect the “Unlimited growth museum” of Le Corbusier (1931) or the “Continuous Monument” of Superstudio (1969)?

There are now tons of these types of variants.

In our case and in our “Preliminary intentions“, we were thinking smaller, personal scale, “cabinet” scale: we speculated about a smaller unit that could be combined with housing… A data center that could fit into a home, for the ones who would like to run it for themselves, for a group of persons (in their physical neighborhood and/or in their nearby distributed nodes) or to combine it with other servers. A highly fragmented version of the data center (the physical infrastructure, but also the software), inspired by “torrent” architectures, with no third party ownership upon data, that could fit into one’s home or into shared spaces, taking advantage of some sort of synergy. This intention we have, to combine data center and housing could sound silly, but could also possibly allow to bring back this infrastructure into cities or dense urban areas, for a more sustainable approach.

The Uptime Institute. Tier certifications

By Tuesday, September 9, 2014 Resources, Sciences & Technology Tags: 0023, Corporate, Datacenter, Infrastructure, Links Permalink 0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptime_Institute

Founded in 1993 by Kenneth G. Brill, the Uptime Institute was acquired by The 451 Group[6] (named after the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury) in 2009. Since then, the Uptime Institute has been an independent division of The 451 Group[7] which is headquartered in New York with offices in locations including San Francisco, Washington DC, London, Boston, Seattle, Denver, São Paulo, Dubai, and Singapore. The 451 Group also owns 451 Research, a technology-industry syndicated research and data firm.

Wikipedia (2014)

… “named after the book Fahrenheit 451″ … no need to invent it!