AOL Launches New Unmanned ‘Lights Out’ Data Center
October 12th, 2011They role all the hardware issues into batch jobs that get dealt with by contractors.
I wonder how many years it will be before they build Ikea warehouse style data centers, where robots will actually pull and replace the defective server units? You could have a data center the size of a couple of football fields alert a pimply faced teenager or prison labor pool, when a stack of dead servers reaches a specified height.
A low wage meatsack would replace the dead server component or components and the repaired server would then be placed in an outgoing queue. A robot would return the server the rackspace when necessary. Scripts would handle the rest.
Wow, the prospects for IT work in the future look great!
Via: Data Center Knowledge:
AOL has begun operations at a new data center that will be completely unmanned, with all monitoring and management being handled remotely. The new “lights out” facility is part of a broader updating of AOL’s infrastructure that leverages virtualization and modular design to rapidly deploy and manage server capacity.
…
“Failures and issues on-site go into a planned maintenance mode,” said Manos. “We simply move the instances (or create new ones) to other data center facilities and the failed equipment is addressed in a scheduled way using outsourced or vendor partners. This is hugely cost beneficial for us as we can now build SLAs around the service without having to worry about the cost of staffing for ‘something to go wrong’.”
Related: Some Ikea Warehouses Run 24 Hours Per Day, In the Dark, with the Work Being Done by Robots
