back to article Want to stiffen your rack?

Data centre storage arrays slow down because of background data centre vibration. Or so consultant Julian Turner maintains. Others deny the problem even exists. Julian Turner's research which showed the vibration-induced performance drop off identified Green Platform Corporation (GPC). Turner said: "They are definitely the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    This topic is not unknown to me...

    I bought a tower case a while ago that allowed me to slot harddrives into trays with rubber mountings. They make perfect sense. Set the mountings up in such a way that the drives 'hang' off them. Ta-da. No vibration.

    I don't get why people only cotton on to this now!

  2. ilikejam
    Go

    Aaaaahrgh! Aaaaaahrg!

    Obligatory Sun geezer shouting at his JBODs:

    http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/unusual_disk_latency

  3. Drew 11

    Bouncy is better

    Vibration resistant racks?

    That doesn't sound like much fun.

  4. Tom Samplonius
    Thumb Down

    "Tier 1" doesn't mean what you think it does

    It surprises me when experts say stuff, like "...testing in the Tier 1 data center..."

    Tier 1 data centers are the lowest form of data center. Tier 4 is the best. See TIA-942, Uptime Institute, etc.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Wrong target market

    If the IT bods don't fall for it, then there are untold thousands of hi-fi "purists" that will buy these rack to isolate their overpriced record players.

  6. Christian Berger

    Easy to find out

    Just take a harddisk, measure the current of the voice-coil moving the heads with a transient recorder and read a few sectors on different tracks of the disk. Now look at how that changes when you lightly vibrate the disk.

    This is trivially easy to do in less than a week by a semi-skilled worker with about 1500 Euros worth of equipment.

  7. Chris Mellor 1

    Xiotech comment

    From Xiotech's Rob Peglar:-

    In an otherwise interesting [story], I was surprised to find the lack of research and mention of the dozens of patents and R&D performed by companies like Seagate in the field of disk and disk enclosure vibration.

    These patents date back to 1999 and before. While I certainly agree with the [original Usenix paper] author's hypothesis that rack-level vibration is to be minimized, he has ignored the work of making the storage enclosures themselves resistant to vibration, both internal and induced (harmonic).

    In other words, focus on the enclosure itself, such as the work by Cunha et al on disk enclosures that significantly reduce vibration, so much so several patents have been awarded. Several of these patents and the inherent intellectual property within are embodied today in the Xiotech Intelligent Storage Element (ISE), so much so that the element is offered with a 5-year hardware warranty at zero cost.

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