Predictions for 2008: A massive data meltdown
Remember the panic when the first computer worm hit? We're going to have a crisis like that next year when we get the first data center meltdown, predicted Subodh Bapat, a vice president in the eco-computing team at Sun Microsystems.
"You'll see a massive failure in a year," Bapat said at a dinner with reporters on Monday. "We are going to see a data center failure of that scale."
"That scale" referred to the problems caused by the worm created by Cornell grad student Robert Morris Jr. in 1988. His worm infected about 5 percent of the Unix boxes on the Internet, freaked people out, and helped jump-start the security industry.
Of course, it's just a prediction, so there is no guarantee that it will happen. But it does seem possible. Data centers have mushroomed with the flood of processes and jobs being turned over to the Internet. Companies have built up their data centers, but even with technologies like virtualization it's been tough to keep up. At some point, a data center is going to crash and people are going to go spastic.
On a more cheery note, Bapat and other Sun executives said that the IT industry is also on the verge of a construction boom that, if it happens, will lead to big orders for equipment for makers of servers, storage systems, and other data center equipment.
The typical life span of a data center is only about 10 to 12 years, said the Sun executives. Thus, a lot of those data centers built at the beginning of the dot-com era need to be rebuilt. Other companies like Facebook are expanding rapidly as well. (Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos mentioned Facebook several times, so it sounds like maybe Sun is working with, or trying to work with, them. Just a thought.)
National labs and universities are also looking at new centers. Next year, one of the national labs has plans to build a data center that will take up 500,000 square feet and consume 50 megawatts. (Big data centers now take up 400,000 square feet and chew up 40 megawatts, Sun executives said.)
Other organizations are looking at 50-megawatt to 70-megawatt data centers.
If there is actual or percived risk or liability pertaining to data theft, maybe corps wont keep our our personal info, SSN, DOBs, search terms, buying habits, and mommies madien name on one flash drive on some IT dudes keychain.
a 50 MW data center has ? Terabytes ?
A typical 4 way system would likely have 2 1450W power supplies and a 2 way maybe 2 850W.
Do the math and that's alot of servers, but that's also not taking into account power requirements for environmental and lighting.
Nominally, it is built to only need one of the two (with the load balanced between them and a failed PSU causing the other to kick up to full wattage as backup). Long story short - this puppy can eat up to 1kW all by itself, and it only eats 2U of rack space (a typical full-sized rack has room for 48U).
Most datacenters charge by the kW/MW as part of their billing... (the other two factors are bandwidth and physical space used). It would take about 1,000 DL 380's to suck down a megawatt. However, we still haven't counted routers (you don't want to know what a Cisco 4k or 6k series switch, or a Quantum PX-series autoloader eats).
A typical datacenter has room for at least a couple of thousand devices, so 40-60 MW isn't all that unreasonable a figure nowadays for a larger one.
HTH,
/P
- by whitejohn29 June 20, 2008 11:12 PM PDT
- I wonder what will happen if worm will really hit computeres the next year.My name is John, and My site is http://geocities.com/whitejohn29
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