A Data Center Built With Shipping Containers

allenjs — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:06:00 GMT

Yesterday, Microsoft became the first in the industry to announce a data center designed entirely with shipping container-based server modules. It's a sizable data center, supporting somewhere between 150,000 an 440,000 servers. Mike Manos revealed some specifics about the Chicago data center at a talk at Data Center World.

James Hamilton has some commentary on his blog. James has been evangelizing the advantages of shipping container-based data centers for years, inside the company and within the industry. As he points out, several of the largest equioment companies are now providing containers, and you can be sure that we are not the only company buying them. But this is the first time anyone has talked publicly about a real industry-scale data center designed from the ground up for containers. I'm particularly interested by the fact that the containers use angle parking instead of being arranged at right angles.

This is a big accomplishment, and no doubt a sign of where the rest of the industry will be moving in coming years. Congratulations to Mike, James, and the rest of the team!

Greg Linden: Trends in Collective Intelligence and Centralization

allenjs — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:02:00 GMT

Rich user experiences are going mainstream on a wider variety of devices and putting pressure on web standards. This trend is changing the face of the web as we know it, and we've covered this trend extensively here and at the MIX conferences. But there is another trend that is also changing the web forever, and Ray Ozzie's keynote at MIX08 was a shot across the bow regarding Microsoft's response to this seismic shift.

In his keynote, Ray talked about the "mesh", and the inexorable shift of services into large centralized data centers. We announced some cloud storage services, and discussed our philosophy of keeping control at the edges. This is really just the beginning, and we'll be having a deep conversation with the industry over the next year.

To kick off the conversation here on MIX Online, I asked Greg Linden to share his broad industry perspective about some of these topics. Greg led development of Amazon's ground-breaking recommender systems, created Findory, and recently joined Microsoft to work on some top-secret incubation projects. He continues to run the popular "Geeking with Greg" blog, where he riffs on large-scale centralized computing, data mining, and "collective intelligence".

Just a few of the topics we talked about:

Is MapReduce/Hadoop really as good as SQL?
What are the limits of social search?
What good is collective intelligence, anyway?
Will all of the world get sucked into one or two datacenters?

Entries tagged with cloud - MIX Online

A Data Center Built With Shipping Containers

Greg Linden: Trends in Collective Intelligence and Centralization