# Dta Centers use the equiv of 30 nuclear power plants



## LincTex (Apr 1, 2011)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/t...gy-belying-industry-image.html?pagewanted=all

Data Centers: These suckers use TREMENDOUS amounts of electricity!! All to store old pictures and emails, LOL!

And to think the EPA won't allow certain diesel engines to be imported (no matter how efficient) due to them not meeting Tier 2 emissions :soapbox2:


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## teotwaki (Aug 31, 2010)

Thanks for sharing the article!!

As the world transitions to more and more electronic storage the potentially devastating loss of critical information looms ever larger. If we ever had a truly epic SHTF incident on the national power grid the damage to computer data centers can be initially handled by backup power systems but if the batteries die or generators run out of fuel?

Hopefully solid state drives will continue to grow in capacity and drop in price and provide a slow but long-lasting form of data storage that can survive power outages.

Anybody on the forum know much about enterprise level data storage?


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## The_Blob (Dec 24, 2008)

teotwaki said:


> Thanks for sharing the article!!
> 
> As the world transitions to more and more electronic storage the potentially devastating loss of critical information looms ever larger. If we ever had a truly epic SHTF incident on the national power grid the damage to computer data centers can be initially handled by backup power systems but if the batteries die or generators run out of fuel?
> 
> ...


2TB SSD w/200MB/s r/w for < $100 seems pretty damn good to me. What MORE do you need? :eyebulge: :teehee:


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## teotwaki (Aug 31, 2010)

The_Blob said:


> 2TB SSD w/200MB/s r/w for < $100 seems pretty damn good to me. What MORE do you need? :eyebulge: :teehee:


I agree that those are cheap but that is a single personal drive. A company (enterprise) data center sized unit would have to be thousands of times bigger, right?


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## The_Blob (Dec 24, 2008)

teotwaki said:


> I agree that those are cheap but that is a single personal drive. A company (enterprise) data center sized unit would have to be thousands of times bigger, right?


true, or multiples  , but that ain't MY responsibility.


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## Bobbb (Jan 7, 2012)

I chuckled when I read this in the New York Times. The article is embedded within deep liberal values. "Oh, heavens to Betsy, these data centers use electricity in a less than efficient manner. Something should be done about this." Meanwhile, does the NYT sell every copy of their daily newspaper? What do they do with the surplus papers that they print? Also, they're cutting down trees, putting them on trucks, sending them to mills and pulp plants, injecting precious water into the pulping process, polluting the water with chemicals, using energy to heat up the water, using energy to transform the pulp into rolls of paper, driving those huge paper rolls half way across the country so that they could print NY gossip on that paper. Oh, the humanity of it all. 

Electricity is a commodity, just like paper. If someone finds it in their interest to be less that efficient in their use of that electricity then they are engaged in a trade-off, just like the NYT is engaged in a trade-off of printing more papers than it sells.


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## invision (Aug 14, 2012)

teotwaki said:


> Thanks for sharing the article!!
> 
> As the world transitions to more and more electronic storage the potentially devastating loss of critical information looms ever larger. If we ever had a truly epic SHTF incident on the national power grid the damage to computer data centers can be initially handled by backup power systems but if the batteries die or generators run out of fuel?
> 
> ...


Ok, what do you need to know? Most HDDs found in data centers are going to be either in servers or in SANs (storage area networks). Today most will be Sata devices a few SCCI devices, and very little solid state if any. The SATA and SCCI will be anywhere from 500GB to 2TB in size, arrayed together in redundancy called Raid, either raid 0, 5, 10, or 50. Three 1TB drives in Raid 5 equals 2TB of usable storage, but if one drive fails data is still safe. Severs can typically have 6-8 drives, SANs can have as few as 5 and as many as 100+. SANs also have hot spares, meaning if a drive fails a spare loaded one will kick on, a single is sent saying i have a down drive, and the manufacture will have a drive to you in 4 hours and a replacement engineer, Also the drives found in this equipment will be minimum 7200rpm, to 15000rpm for spindle speeds. A typical home PC may have 1 drive that is 1TB but runs at 5500rpm for spindle speed for comparison. Additionally the Raid Controller cards found in both servers and SANs will have an internal battery and a few GBs of RAM. so if power goes down, data being written to the drive at moment of failure is not lost at all. If the devices are hard crashed, typically data is safe, but... Corruption can occur.

Most good data centers like Google's or ETrade or Microsoft or HP (a few that are here in Atlanta) will be on a specialized diesel delivery list, right up next to hospitals on importance levels. All good data centers will have not only redundant electricity - 2 battery sources but also enough to run diesel generation for 72 hrs, once a month the will test fail over to battery then to generator and back to electricity, but will have redundant cooling systems and trunk lines from multiple carriers for Internet access.


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## teotwaki (Aug 31, 2010)

invision said:


> Ok, what do you need to know? Most HDDs found in data centers are going to be either in servers or in SANs (storage area networks). Today most will be Sata devices a few SCCI devices, and very little solid state if any. The SATA and SCCI will be anywhere from 500GB to 2TB in size, arrayed together in redundancy called Raid, either raid 0, 5, 10, or 50. Three 1TB drives in Raid 5 equals 2TB of usable storage, but if one drive fails data is still safe. Severs can typically have 6-8 drives, SANs can have as few as 5 and as many as 100+. SANs also have hot spares, meaning if a drive fails a spare loaded one will kick on, a single is sent saying i have a down drive, and the manufacture will have a drive to you in 4 hours and a replacement engineer, Also the drives found in this equipment will be minimum 7200rpm, to 15000rpm for spindle speeds. A typical home PC may have 1 drive that is 1TB but runs at 5500rpm for spindle speed for comparison. Additionally the Raid Controller cards found in both servers and SANs will have an internal battery and a few GBs of RAM. so if power goes down, data being written to the drive at moment of failure is not lost at all. If the devices are hard crashed, typically data is safe, but... Corruption can occur.
> 
> Most good data centers like Google's or ETrade or Microsoft or HP (a few that are here in Atlanta) will be on a specialized diesel delivery list, right up next to hospitals on importance levels. All good data centers will have not only redundant electricity - 2 battery sources but also enough to run diesel generation for 72 hrs, once a month the will test fail over to battery then to generator and back to electricity, but will have redundant cooling systems and trunk lines from multiple carriers for Internet access.


Good details! I know a bit about backup power systems but not so much about data center operation. My question is more about if power is lost across most of the civilized world well beyond the limits of the UPS and diesel generators, maybe off for years. If the data is inacessible or lost then we have no easy or simple way to recover the lost knowledge. Books would become extremely valuable to rebuilding science and industry.


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## invision (Aug 14, 2012)

teotwaki said:


> Good details! I know a bit about backup power systems but not so much about data center operation. My question is more about if power is lost across most of the civilized world well beyond the limits of the UPS and diesel generators, maybe off for years. If the data is inacessible or lost then we have no easy or simple way to recover the lost knowledge. Books would become extremely valuable to rebuilding science and industry.


The HDD's should be fine. Therefore the Operating System for the servers should be fine. They may need to replace the battery on the Raid cards, but that is for cached memory while running. I have HDDs I haven't touched in a year or more, as well as a few servers sitting unplugged, and I can boot them right up right now and the data will be there. So data would be lost while no power, but once it is restored, the machines would boot up... Now having the admin passwords to log in may be lost, but they can be acquired with a little effort.

The real question would be, will there be experts still alive who can get the machines live again post SHTF?


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## LincTex (Apr 1, 2011)

Bobbb said:


> I chuckled when I read this in the New York Times. The article is embedded within deep liberal values.


Yes... Of course, the NYT would be. Notice they mention the paper industry usage is right up there (67 billion KWh), just a few billion KWh under data center usage 



invision said:


> The real question would be, will there be experts still alive who can get the machines live again post SHTF?


Good question. Also, what data will be deemed important, and how hard would it be to locate those files?

Of course, no one cares about the 2013 Neiman Marcus catalog so much, but scanned and archived reference books would be useful. People who have a lot of "electronic" money would like to be able to prove the funds existed, but those with a lot of debt would love to have a "Fight Club" type data loss occur!

In the Great Depression, banks became extremely wealthy due to foreclosures of property that went into default. I have seen the old County plat copies my grandfather had, with the name on the deed of MANY properties belonging to one bank or another.
Maybe that is what everyone is shooting for again?


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## teotwaki (Aug 31, 2010)

invision said:


> ---minor SNIP----
> The real question would be, will there be experts still alive who can get the machines live again post SHTF?


YES, that is a question that can apply to many of the technologically complex fields.

Thank you for the great information!


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## LincTex (Apr 1, 2011)

teotwaki said:


> YES, that is a question that can apply to many of the technologically complex fields


Off topic, but a *LOT* of old skills are getting lost. 
All machine shops jobs now-a-days look for CNC experience. 
New machinists nowadays are just computer programmers, not real machinists.


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## teotwaki (Aug 31, 2010)

LincTex said:


> Off topic, but a *LOT* of old skills are getting lost.
> All machine shops jobs now-a-days look for CNC experience.
> New machinists nowadays are just computer programmers, not real machinists.


Hey! It is YOUR thread, LOL! No one can complain if you go "off topic". 

I would hope that a CNC machinist had actually had hands-on use of a manual lathe or a mill before they were allowed to have a chance at ruining a CNC machine.


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