Previous page:Why Microsoft's container-based approach doesn't work
4. Containers are a temporary, not long-term, solution.
To meet its late summer opening date for the Chicago data centre, Microsoft has already opened the containers up for bid. Manos declined to comment on which vendors are in the running, but he confirmed that Microsoft hopes to award contracts to multiple vendors.
Microsoft is in the midst of its huge data centre expansion in order to accommodate its growing Windows Live and Office Live online services. As a result, containers provide an "excellent opportunity to increase the scale unit, from server, to rack, to server to mini data centre," Manos said.
But what happens when expansion inevitably slows? Eventually, adding servers one 2,000-server container at a time will start to feel like going to Costco to buy a 50-pound bag of dog food for your toy poodle.
"I think this is a very short-lived, ephemeral model that may work right now," said Biggs, who added that most data centres operators, such as Peak10, have no interest in containers because the scale is simply too large for them and their customers.
"The only thing interesting to me about containers is the predictability of how much power you need and how much heat you'll produce," he said. "Otherwise, they're kind of a novelty."
That's why some observers, such as Ohara, say the market is actually in smaller units. A former supply chain engineer for both Hewlett-Packard and Apple, Ohara has been developing his own prototypes for a "server cube" that would weigh about 1,000 pounds and measure 1 meter in each dimension - hence the name of his blog, GreenM3.
"It's taking what's in a server rack but putting it into a cube to make it more efficient to roll out," he said. "That potentially could apply to many more people."
Manos agreed that containers aren't the be-all and end-all for data centres, including Microsoft's. He pointed out that the second floor of the Chicago data centre will still be fully comprised of conventional free-standing server racks.
"For us, it is about right-sizing the scale with the 'needs and speeds' of deployments," he said. "As it stands today, containers deliver on this goal."
"If trends continue as anticipated, containers will continue to be an important piece to the puzzle, but not the only piece," he said. But Manos also acknowledged, "The only true constant in technology is that technology will change. Whether that means the server compute form factor changes I can only guess."
5. Containers don't make a data centre greener.
Microsoft has not-so-subtly tried to portray its new data centres as being exemplars of green computing. In San Antonio, the site of an upcoming 470,000-square-foot data centre, construction workers built around an old live oak tree on the 44-acre site, even putting up concrete barriers to help protect it according to the local newspaper. It also plans to use recycled gray water in the data centre and install the most efficient hardware, power and cooling systems.
Apart from preserving old-growth oak trees, Microsoft is doing many of the same things at its Chicago data centre. Another thing about locating in the Windy City is that it is considered the most energy-efficient U.S. city in which to locate a data centre.
Indeed, Microsoft said late last year that being in Chicago will enable it to use "all sorts of cold-air cooling options in the winter months," a process known as airside economization.
An airside economizer, explained Svenkeson, is a fancy term for "cutting a hole in the wall and putting in a big fan to suck in the cold air." Ninety per cent more efficient than air conditioning, airside economizers sound like a miracle of Mother Nature, right?
Except that they aren't. For one, they don't work - or work well, anyway - during the winter, when air temperature is below freezing. Letting that cold, dry air simply blow in would immediately lead to a huge buildup of static electricity, which is lethal to servers, Svenkeson said.
To keep the humidity at the 30 per cent minimum of most data centres, water would need to be added to the air as it blows in. But that requires exorbitant amounts of energy and can create a huge condensation problem if done wrong.
"You'll quickly have an ice-side economizer," Svenkeson quipped.
Airside economizers actually work better in warmer climates, or in places such as the American Southwest where temperatures drop quickly (but not below zero) at night, Svenkeson said. Or they can work in office environments, where maintaining a minimum humidity is easier because of the workers inside and also less vital.
A less risky solution is using an air conditioning system that can be transformed during the winter into a so-called closed-loop liquid cooling system. This process essentially involved exposing coolant-bearing pipes to the hot air inside the data centre. The coolant absorbs the heat and expands, rushing through the pipes to the outside of the building.
There, it cools, shrinks and flows back inside, where it repeats the process.
While closed-loop systems are "wickedly efficient," according to Biggs, they still take a lot of energy to work. "There's no free lunch. The laws of physics haven't been repealed."
Even with cutting-edge cooling systems, it still takes a watt of electricity to a cool a server for every watt spent to power it, estimated Svenkeson.
"It's quite astonishing the amount of energy you need," Svenkeson said.
Or as Emcor's Baker put it, "With every 19-inch rack, you're running something like 40,000 watts. How hot is that? Go and turn your oven on."
Manos acknowledged that Microsoft's initial plan to use only air-side economizers, especially during the winter, was overly optimistic. As a result, the Chicago data centre will use both air and liquid cooling. "We're optimizing for both extremes," he said.
Manos wouldn't go into details, except to say "an entire organization of research and engineering people" is working on cooling and power issues. "I'm not sure if we're doing anything more revolutionary in this space, but a lot of the problems have been solved."
And he emphasized that with the cost of power making up the vast majority of the ongoing cost of its data centre operations, Microsoft has every incentive to make sure they are as energy-efficient as possible.
But with Microsoft building three electrical substations on-site generating a total of 198 megawatts, or enough to power almost 200,000 homes, green becomes a relative term, others say.
"People talk about making data centres green. There's nothing green about them. They drink electricity and belch heat," Biggs said. "Doing this in pods is not going to turn this into a miracle."
6. Containers are a programmer's approach to a mechanical engineer's problem.
Some say that there are good reasons why geeks have given Microsoft a free pass so far on its containers plan. First, they seem to offer a long-overdue paradigm shift in power and cooling problems that, by comparison, seem to routinely occur in software and other areas of IT, but that haven't yet really happened for power and cooling.
"I think IT guys look at how much faster we can move data and think this can also happen in the real world of electromechanics," Baker said.
Another is that techies, unfamiliar with and perhaps even a little afraid of electricity and cooling issues, want something that will make those factors easier to control, or if possible a nonproblem. Containers seem to offer that.
"These guys understand computing, of course, as well as communications," Svenkeson said. "But they just don't seem to be able to maintain a staff that is competent in electrical and mechanical infrastructure. They don't know how that stuff works."
Svenkeson tells the story of the data centre manager whose UPS systems kept overloading, even though he had each of them set at only 80 per cent load. Turns out, the pair of UPSs was running 160 per cent of the maximum load through his servers, which is why they kept failing.
Attempting to eliminate these variables through plug-and-play containers "is a fairly natural response," Svenkeson said, though he believes it's the wrong one. He argues that containers will ultimately be seen as a "fast-food approach."
"It might be a viable market, but only for a limited time," he said. "As soon as the first containers arrive with a bunch of broken processors inside, that will be the end of it."
Manos is unfazed. Much of the criticism, he implied, is knee-jerk.
"Data centres are very conservative," he said. "You go into one built a year ago or one built 10 years ago and they'll look very similar."
Microsoft had been testing containers for almost a year before it started talking about them publicly, Manos said. What Microsoft has revealed so far is just the tip of the iceberg. When critics learn more, he says, they'll be convinced.
"Half of the people say this is the greatest thing they'd ever heard. The other half say this will never work inside a data centre," Manos said. "But the fact of the matter is that this does work."
icon.
