Certainly another key conceptual element of cloud computing. At least on the infrastructural side. A highly secured (yet paranoid) approach of hardware and software.
How do you stack your rack?
The rack unit: U
The 19 inches 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
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.
Meanwhile… The “classical” extra large data center, in 2014
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 Data Center
For a fully configured and directly buyable personal cluster (21’000.- $, still), see also for example the Personal Cluster Model 1600 by Nor-Tech.
