Facebook Suffers Actual Cloud In Oregon Datacenter 83
An anonymous reader writes "The Register carries the funniest, most topical IT story of the year: 'Facebook's first data center ran into problems of a distinctly ironic nature when a literal cloud formed in the IT room and started to rain on servers. Though Facebook has previously hinted at this via references to a 'humidity event' within its first data center in Prineville, Oregon, the social network's infrastructure king Jay Parikh told The Reg on Thursday that, for a few minutes in Summer, 2011, Facebook's data center contained two clouds: one powered the social network, the other poured water on it.'"
Maybe Berndnaut Smilde snuck in: (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/artist-creates-beautiful-indoor-clouds [mnn.com]
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Interesting)
Welcome to Oregon, it rains a lot.
From the Article
This resulted in cold aisle supply temperature exceeding 80F and relative humidity exceeding 95%. The Open Compute servers that are deployed within the data center reacted to these extreme changes. Numerous servers were rebooted and few were automatically shut down due to power supply unit failure.
WTF 80 deg F (approx 27 deg C) is quite warm in a Data-centre especially in a "cold aisle" and 95% humidity is criminal.
Facebook learned from the mistakes, and now designs its servers with a seal around their power supply, or as Parikh calls it, "a rubber raincoat."
When designing a Data-centre you have to plan for a certain temperature range that the equipment you have inside operates optimally. In addition you have to keep the humidity within manufacture recommended limits since too low results in static electricity and too high well you could get condensation on the electrical equipment. Rubber seals may protect power supplies although I don't think this will completely protect them, but what about the rest of the equipment such as the electronics, connectors and what about backup systems which are very susceptible to temperature and humidity just to name a few.
:)
My score for this design is zero out of ten and ten out of ten for LOL, welcome to cloud computing
There are at least 3 clouds then. (Score:4, Interesting)
The first cloud would be the humidity and condensation sort. The second cloud would be the online service itself. The third cloud, would be the open Internet between the endpoints in a network graph. [infront.com]
What do all these clouds have in common? They're dangerous. The less clouds in your diagram the more you know about your network architecture, latency, and data integrity. The less clouds the better! When a packet goes into the shroud of the cloud in the diagram there's a much higher chance we'll never see it again. This cloud is the one where we must encrypt our data and protect against spoofing and hacking and all forms of data manipulation and latency. The receiving end must be very careful to sanitize the inputs and verify the requests vigorously all because the packet has encountered the cloud. Likewise if we want to interact with an online "cloud" service, we shift the name packet to "our stuff" our login credentials and even bank account info, we have to worry about availability and bandwidth caps when streaming, and unwanted prying eyes from folks we may not desire to have looking, everything becomes far more risky because our stuff touched the cloud service; Far more risky than physically going to the bank or visiting a friend in person would not be subject to. If someone hacks the ATM, the entire bank doesn't lose everyone's credentials. As for the mist filled variety of cloud: It can not only get wet, but if you have a big enough cloud, it can strike you with lightning. We must have surge protections and battery backups against this cloud too.
When I hear people talking about embracing the "cloud" I cringe. "To The Cloud!", in my mind means, "Danger Will Robinson!"
Re:As somebody working on building energy topics (Score:4, Interesting)
That this happens shows me that they realy optimize their air conditioning for energy consumption.
Traditionally the approach would have been: "Dont think, cool down and re-heat the air constantly to dehumidify it sufficiently". So traditionally you do this dumb with a lot of energy, even if its not needed at all times. What we probably see there is that some control could not (predict or) handle some drop in the inner load (electrial power) in the data center.
The Facebook Oregon datacenter doesn't 'have' air conditioning.
The building is an 'air conditioner'. Its an experimental design...