BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

Watts a matter with their marketing?

Thursday May 17, 2007

...sorry for the bad pun, but wattage is a huge concern at most datacenters.

Vendors need to state watts/performance at full performance on benchmark and not watts/performance at low utilisation. Datacenter managers must plan and provision a datacenter knowing the peak watts. There is no way they could count on poor (low) utilisation of servers to keep their datacenters from frying.
Need to use metrics of Watt/performance so it matches $/performance. I've blogged about this before: http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/power_performance_metrics
Stop selling the advantage of brand new latest systems and low utilisation. It matters not that there are lots of sloppy low utilisation datacenters, because anyone buying new stuff if they are not running at 50% or more are just wasteful and not worth taking any advice from. I've blogged about this before: http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/the_total_tyranny_of_low

These are some of thoughts after talking to a dozen customers this week.

Like this post?

Posted at 01:36PM May 17, 2007 in Wattage-Power
Tags: datacenters utilization watts

Double-stack railroad cars? container riverboats?

Thursday Oct 26, 2006

Brainstorming more about Sun's Blackbox, what are some creative disaster recovery scenarios for Blackbox. There are containers on double-stack railroad cars, is this how they should done for rapid disaster recovery. Just load up a railroad car with Blackbox compute & storage containers, add in a chiller, some generator and fuel cars, etc.

What do the oil/gas people need to do seismic processing in the field?

What kind of riverboats can hold containers of the same type of config?

Barges?

Icebreakers?

I'll look in the comments for some of your wild ideas...

I know that something like 95% of all cargo moves in container ships but what other kinds of intermodal transportation might make you rethink how future datacenters are designed?

Fun facts
There are enough containers to build a 8-foot-high wall twice around the equator!

So you may be thinking why should we look at these wild ideas. Well if you wanted to have some Blackboxes stacked on a railroad car, could you get to the power and water port, etc. So could one run it when it is parked and still stacked? I always think wild ideas are worth thinking about...

[2] Comments