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Is there a need to standardize datacenter containers?
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 19 November 2009, 19:28 IST
Bangalore: Microsoft, is doing its best to nudge the datacenter industry toward the use of standard Pre-Assembled Components (PACs), which is how the company describes the server-filled containers in its new Chicago datacenter.
Some may see Microsoft's 'container farm' as an outlier - an anomaly representing a particular approach unlikely to be replicated in other datacenters, reports Datacenter Knowledge. Could Microsoft's effort instead represent a tipping point in a broader movement towards modular datacenter design? The company's cloud operation is large enough to focus vendors' attention on the concept, which could result in an ecosystem that lowers costs for end users. Microsoft aspires to create a container-based standard platform that our industry can innovate around, providing common interfaces and an RFP (request for proposal) process that allows many vendors to develop products and compete for business.
But Microsoft isn't alone in this effort, and some industry executives warn that Microsoft's vision of a containerized future may not work for everyone. Two other industry heavyweights, Digital Realty Trust and IBM, are also standardizing their designs around modular systems and repeatable designs that can drive the cost and delays out of datacenter construction, while leveraging the power of bulk purchasing and RFPs with large numbers attached to them.
Server-filled containers are just the beginning of Microsoft's PAC strategy, according to Microsoft's Daniel Costello, who said the company will also issue RFPs for containerized electrical and mechanical equipment.
When a company buys 2,000 servers at a time, server markers pay attention. And when a company plans to repeat that purchase 100 times, vendors begin jumping through hoops. When Microsoft announced its plan for a container data center in Chicago, only Sun Microsystems, Rackable Systems (SGI) and Verari had container products. With Microsoft planning to fill the Chicago site with between 250,000 and 400,000 servers - at a time when enterprise server sales were slowing - the container competition heated up as IBM, HP and Dell soon offered their own 'datacenter in a box offerings.
Cost is also the driving factor in Digital Realty Trust's push toward an 'industrialization' of datacenter design and construction, featuring pre-assembled or modular components that can be quickly brought together at a construction site. Digital Realty has built more than one million square feet of Turn-Key datacenter space and now operates more than 80 mission-critical buildings.
