Sun Puts Data Center Through 6.7 Earthquake 195
An anonymous reader sent in a video clip showing Sun experimenting with shoving a data center through a simulated 6.7 Earthquake.
Everything stays running, but some power cords came out and some screws worked loose. It's still kind of neat to see a bunch of racks shake like a polaroid.
Slashdot meets 21st century!? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hard drives?? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"shake like a polaroid" ? (Score:3, Informative)
As in, shake the instant photo to help it develop.
The funny part is, the shaking never really helped the photo develop. It just did the user something to do while the chemicals did their work.
My mother had a Polaroid instant camera in the UK and we had never heard of shaking the pictures until we came to the US. It seemed as stupid as shaking a bottle of water to make it more watery or something.
Re:"shake like a polaroid" ? (Score:3, Informative)
>>>shake the instant photo to help it develop.
That is Not what you do with a polaroid. Shaking the photo can cause damage. The proper procedure is to lay it someplace dark and wait 2-3 minutes.
Old news. (Score:2, Informative)
I knew there was something familiar about this. I stumbled upon it on a slow day at work a couple of years ago. The video is dated 2007 at the end.
Re:Hard drives?? (Score:5, Informative)
Neither does Sun. This kind of shock-and-vibe testing is actually routine for their products — I've been in the lab where it's done. That lab can't handle anything bigger than a rack, hence the outsourcing of this particular test.
Re:Hard drives?? (Score:2, Informative)
If firmly mounted, the drives are very shock tolerant. What people don't realize is how high the G force generated when hard object like a drive hits a hard object like a table. You can get instantaneous tens, possibly hundreds of Gs. Earthquakes can generate several Gs, but not tens. Problems tend to occur when structures have forces in unexpected directions (walls are bad at shifting sideways, masonry doesn't like decompression) or when you get resonance with the oscillation, which builds up the energy. Disk drives don't have these failure modes.
Re:Hard drives?? (Score:2, Informative)
Even properly mounted high speed drives can be susceptible to shake damage. In installing a new rack in our datacenter a wire monkey used a hammer drill in our concrete floor next to a rack full of running servers. We had a number of 15000rpm drives have bad sectors from that. They were properly mounted servers and drives. Now if they were 7200rpm drives we probably would have been fine, but what data center needed high speed data access wouldn't use 15000rpm drives.
Long story short, I would love to see the sector analysis from those hard drives.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Old. (Score:3, Informative)
A KVM is a device that allows you to use one one keyboard, video display and mouse and switch across multiple computers.
A pushcart is a frame on wheels that you can put stuff on and push around.
A KVM pushcart is a KVM switch, monitor, keyboard and mouse on a cart that you can push around to bring to different racks to use the KVM without having to have a KVM setup in each rack with dedicated connections to each server.