Dell to reveal 'micro data centres' for outdoor use

Outside the office, inside the warehouse

This really doesn't strike me as something that would be outside, say, next to a traffic signal box or something like that. This is something that would be put into the "outdoors" of a warehouse, The system uses some beefy hardware, with a "fan wall" inside it.

If someone was serious about putting servers outside, the system would not be generating enough heat to require an extremely high air flow. Something like that would suck in so much dirt you'd open the case and need a shovel to clean it out. No, you'd be using low-power systems, or something that has heat pipes going into a heat exchange.

Or perhaps it'd be suitable for those areas of the world that don't have large air-conditioned data centers on tap?

There are quite a few of them I hear.

With handy fork lift access

That will be handy when someone wants to make a break with the box that looks Ike it's been dumped outside and they think they can make a few quid recycling the steel

Disaster Recovery

Maybe disaster recovery is a good use case as well.

I remember many years ago, working at an engineering company in Chesterfield, when our IBM S/38 went TITSUP and the fix was going to take days.

Fortunately our IT manager (one of the old-school clever ones, not a PHB) had an insurance policy for on-site disaster recovery in place so later that day a lorry arrived and left a trailer containing a full system for us to use our disaster recovery procedures on (parked in a road backing on to the computer room with twinax cables through the window) - worked like a charm too!

Caves

Obvious data centres. Constant air temperature, a touch humid, perhaps. And subject to the odd rock fall, but you know, you'd get failing silicon in any datacenter.

I would have thought

It'd be good for large industrial sites as well as for things like air monitoring stations (there's one right by one of the busiest bus routes in the city centre thats the size of half a car, plenty of room for one of these to sit in and monitor...other things.....)

On a related note, it will be interesting to see how well the new vented BT/OpenReach roadside cabs stand up to being buried in snow*, particularly that nice solid stuff studded with rock salt that gets chucked up by ploughs, now they are packed full of FTTC kit...

*assuming we ever have snow again

Déja vu

I'll just leave this here: http://inhabitat.com/sun-microsystems-project-blackbox/