[Gllug] ICE Cube containerised data centre

[John Hearns]

The containerised data centre was parked outside, in a yard. On
Thursday afternoon there was an artic tractor unit, waiting to take it
off to another location.
I had a good tour of the inside. It is setup for a dense install of
the half-depth 1U Rackable server line. The servers are racked
floor-to-ceiling on each side of the trailer,
with all network connections going into the front, so you do not need
to acces the rear of the servers. Cold air is blown into the central
isle by columns of blower units between the colums of servers, so the
rear-server space is a partitioned off 'hot aisle'. Incoming power is
obviously AC, but this is rectified to DC and distributed to the
servers via distribution boards. This increases efficiency in a setup
like this.
The central 2U of the server racks were left blank for switches - yoyu
can specify what switches you require. Same goes for the servers - you
can spec motherboards, processors etc.
I was given a figure of potentially tens of thousands of cores per container.
You can specify what fire supression system and environmental
monitoring you want. That particular container had a little office in
a vestibule, but obviously a setup like this is meant to be totally
lights-out managed -
you don't want to spend a long time in an environment like that.

I didn't take any pictures. They did have a video being shown of one
of these things being moved into position using air jacks - just push
the thing along the floor.
Video with views of the inside:
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/media/icecube/icecube_news.html

If anyone wants to have a serious look at this container, I'll be
happy to give you a contact.
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