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• The Million Server Data Center

  April 28th, 2009 : Rich Miller

  What would it take for a data center to house 1 million servers? The IEEE Spectrum magazine tackled that question recently as part of a feature on mega-data centers prompted by the enormous server farms being built by Microsoft, Google and others (link via James Hamilton). The magazine offers its own vision of what a million-server data center might look like – a huge facility filled with 400 shipping containers, each packed with more than 2,400 servers and cooled by a central cooling system that pumps coolant into the rear of each bank of racks.

  Is such a facility ever likely to be built? Is the hypothetical facility outlined by the IEEE the best approach to this kind of scale?

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Jim Dorman

Posted April 30th, 2009

Seems to be a case of putting too many eggs in one basket. Granted, the center can be architected for high redundancy/availability/reliablility, but sooner or later some large scale catastrophy could affect the entire center, bringing down operations and potentially critical functions at once. Much better to create geographical distance between two (or more) smaller scale facilities or affect some form of redundancy and ability to continue operaitons (for critical processes) despite some large scale disaster–earthquake, high explosive, large scale power outage, etc….

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