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The people behind the Wordpress.com blogging service recently shared some technical information about their new data center in Chicago, which is located in a Layered Technologies facility.
In November, Google wrote in their official blog that they had done an experiment where they had sorted 1 PB (1,000 TB) of data with MapReduce. The information about the sorting itself was impressive, but one thing that stuck in our minds was the following (emphasis added by us):
An interesting question came up while running experiments at such a scale: Where do you put 1PB of sorted data? We were writing it to 48,000 hard drives (we did not use the full capacity of these disks, though), and every time we ran our sort, at least one of our disks managed to break (this is not surprising at all given the duration of the test, the number of disks involved, and the expected lifetime of hard disks).
Each of these sorting runs that Google did lasted six hours. So that would mean that hard drives would be breaking at least 4 times a day for every 48,000 hard drives that a data center is using.
This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. It looks like the secret HQ of a James Bond villain.
And it is real. It is a newly opened high-security data center run by one of Sweden’s largest ISPs, located in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city, sealed off from the world by entrance doors 40 cm thick (almost 16 inches).
Read the full post for plenty of more pictures and cool information.
InformationWeek has managed to get an inside look at 1&1’s Lenexa, Kansas data center, built inside a former storage facility. 1&1 is one of the largest hosting companies in the world (arguably the largest), and this data center certainly isn’t small.
The data center has five server rooms with a total of 860 racks and can handle at least 40,000 servers.
Ever since the iPhone launched here in Sweden we have been in love with it. Considering that we here at Pingdom deal with servers, networks and the Internet on a daily basis, we have evaluated a lot of iPhone apps aimed specifically at sysadmins and webmasters.
In our opinion, the iPhone can be extremely useful to administrators responsible for keeping servers, networks and websites up and running. Loaded with the right applications, it becomes an on-the-move toolbox for when work needs to be done but there’s no computer nearby.
This article lists 12 applications that will turn an iPhone into a veritable Swiss Army knife for any sysadmin, webmaster or network technician.
There have been a lot of numbers thrown around in the last year about the power consumption of servers and data centers. For example, servers and their cooling are now said to consume more power than color TVs in the US. To try and make a bit more sense out of the general information overflow, [...]
Most people who have worked with IT have at one time or another in their work life come across some amazingly strange practices or major oversights that in retrospect seem more or less insane. Here is a collection of crazy stories specifically about data centers and server rooms that we have filtered out from the [...]
We recently bought a bunch of new servers stacked with RAM and dual quad core CPUs. They will be used for backend processing of Pingdom’s monitoring data and some other tasks. We shipped them out to a data center in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, and wanted to share some photos of the “event” [...]
There has been a lot of talk about container data centers lately (sometimes also called modular data centers). Most of the time we are only presented with an image of a branded shipping container, but let’s face it, all the interesting stuff is on the inside! So, since we were curious, we here at Pingdom [...]
Pingdom recently developed a custom status website for the Swedish web hosting company Binero. It’s basically a WordPress plugin, fully skinnable, which shows the current status of all servers and services of the web hosting company, as well as the uptime history for all services. The different services are categorized and grouped, and tech support [...]
