manos

ComputerWorld’s Eric Lai recently posted on 6 reasons why Microsoft's container-based approach to data centers won't work with a sub headline of Are you listening, Microsoft?

I’m pleased to say Michael Manos, our Sr Director of Data Center Services was listening. This should be interesting to follow….

Dave captured some of the best nuggets of the response on his blog but some other nuggets I read:

 

  • We deploy tens of thousands of servers per month (this is getting more and more coverage of late, esp when you consider Facebook seems to run on only 10,000 servers total)
  • “a standard 110V extension cord just won't cut it.  You would need a mighty big shoe size to trip over and unplug one of these containers"
  • the industry has some interesting technologies called battery and rotary UPS' that can easily ride through 17 seconds (downtime) if required, and the larger point is, we truly do not care….The cloud approach eliminates this requirement and draws it up to the application
  • even at 35 people across seven days a week, I believe we are still fat and we could drive this down even more
  • Mike calls our data centers “bit factories”
  • Our data center professionals are measured by the overall uptime of their facility, the overall utilization of the facility (as measured by power), and the overall efficiency of their facility (again as measured by power).
  • We understand the problems, we understand the physics, we understand quite a bit. Our staff has expertise with backgrounds as far ranging as running facilities on nuclear submarines to facilities systems for space going systems

 

Mike’s response is both a fascinating insight on to running massive data centers and I think a text book lesson in responding to criticism in a professional, balanced and transparent way through the blogosphere. The ball is back in Mr Lai’s court I believe :)