I haven’t really posted about this because datacenters haven’t been my thing for a while, but I have been following the discussion with a sort of geeky fascination.
I’d heard the google rumour for a while, then came the Sun announcement, then the Rackable Systems product. The idea is great, no need to scale out your datacenter by buying new buildings and spending millions of dollars to set them up and get all the equipment configured. Instead, buy out a whole shipping container of machines, park it next to (or on top of!) your building, hook up power, water (for cooling), and bandwidth and DONE! Plug&Play at the macro level. Need more power, add another container.
Now, James Hamilton from Microsoft has proposed a twist on the whole thing: Recycleable data centers in trailers! Pack the container to the gils, have no serviceable human parts and when the thing stops working, send it back for a new one! I kinda dig it, although I don’t know why, cause I couldn’t geek out like in that X-files episode.
