That's Huawei I like it: Chinese giant's cloudy arm dumps 19-inch rack for newer model Embattled Chinese electronics giant Huawei said it will design all of its upcoming public cloud data centres around the 21-inch Open Rack standard developed by the Open Compute Project. Who's down with OCP? The OCP was launched by Facebook in 2011, when it was redesigning its data centre in Prineville, Oregon. After the …
I hadn't been paying attention, but wow, what an incredibly f-ing stupid thing to do.
The 19 inch rack has been a standard for nearly a century. Everything ever has been built to fit a 19 inch rack. You can take racks built in 1975 and put brand new equipment in them. There's no need to replace racks, they last pretty much forever.
And then F*c*book comes along and does this. And we even let them get away with calling it 'open' instead of calling it what it really is, the "Stupid F*c*book Rack".
Sometimes "We've always done it this way" actually IS a compelling reason not to change something, because changing it means discarding many, many years of standardization that has resulted in a solution that may not be absolutely perfect, but is very much good enough and doing something like this will not just set up a competing standard but will let others know that this long established standard can now be violated with impunity, thus resulting in even more new 'standards'. See also: https://xkcd.com/927/
(Why did I mention 1975? Oh, because I've got racks in service that used to contain PDP-11 systems built back then.)
>BOLTS not screws
Cage nuts are a comparatively recent innovation. There are still racks around that have round holes for screws. The fun and games is determining which Standard was used and sourcing the relevant bolts/machine screws.
Mind you most racks contain a good mix of ISO threaded stuff and US imperial: A set of racks I've recently had installed are all ISO except for the UPS rack rails that use UNC (machine) screws...
>a 21U rack was literally put together with self tapping screws.
Yes, there are cheap racks... and there are racks that use some surprising easy to loose but hard to source special parts...
We had a bit of equipment (I think it was a Netapp), that had four different sets of mounting bolts and nuts. Two were imperial, and two metric, and none of them were interoperable. (To make it clear, this was a good thing because we had a choice of what type to use).
Of course, all our other stuff is screwed in using hardware from the big bag of mounting stuff. You have to paw through it until you find enough matching hardware to attach whatever you have in hand, so some devices have imperial on one side and metric on the other.
and we should still use AT keyboards and serial mice, or at a pinch PS2. We don't want any of this new-fangled USB nonsense.
What happened to my 20" disk platters though? They had their issues, but we could work around them. You could easily lose these 2.5" disks, you know.
Also, bring back 2.1mm jacks for low voltage power. They worked fine for my grandad; no need for anything more convenient.
AA batteries are fine, but why not keep powering portable equipment with PP9 lantern packs?
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Things change. At least they're making the rack bigger so that any 19" kit you've got could be fitted with a trivial adapter bracket.
>and we should still use AT keyboards and serial mice...
We still are, just that the connectors have changed. Just as we are still using the QWERY keyboard layout invented in 1868 - but not the original mechanical keyboard :)
>Things change. At least they're making the rack bigger
Yes they do, funny how the reasoning seems to be so that you can fit 5 instead of 4 3.5-inch HDD's; when they could have just as easily specified a different HDD size...
Personnally, I prefer to mount my SSD's/HDD's on their sides as it permits a more efficient use of space: 24 across in a 2U chassis.
Interestingly, there is a standard for a metric version of the intermodal shipping container, which also is slightly bigger than the (imperial dimensioned) one's defined back in the 1950's, however, you will be had pushed to find many metric containers...
The difference between cloud scale and conventional data centres is that it actually becomes worthwhile to design/customise your own kit to improve uptime/manageability/maintenance.
AWS employed teams to rewrite UPS firmware because the existing firmware often detected phantom ground faults, Google/AWS created 25Gbps NIC's/switches because 40Gbps equipment was expensive and not able to be fully utilized by their servers, all the big providers use custom disk shelves to increase the capacity of their storage nodes etc.
If you're buying 1 or 2 of something, you go with standards. If you're buying 10,000+ units, you customize them as much as possible because the power/heat/space/maintenance savings are likely to be significant over the 1-2 year life of the equipment.
>If you need to fit your 19" into a 21", you use a rack adapter.
Suspect you've not had to buy equipment specific rack rails and adapter kits and so are unaware of the costs of these when populating a few racks...
Interestingly, I suspect the problem the vast majority will experience is trying to fit a new 21" server into a datacenter full of 19" racks...
Also, I suspect the vast majority of cloud datacenters today (including those in Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) are using 19-inch racks.. So deploying 21-inch racks only becomes a consideration if you are building a new cloud datacenter and don't want it to be compatible with your existing datacenters, or are purchasing prepopulated rack configurations and thus an equipment refresh is also a rack refresh.
"Also, I suspect the vast majority of cloud datacenters today (including those in Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) are using 19-inch racks.. So deploying 21-inch racks only becomes a consideration"
The majority of cloud data centres typically deploy equipment as a pre-built rack - ether during initial deployment or during equipment upgrades to allow for pre-deployment testing so it's unlikely to be a significant consideration outside of the physical space required.
As the majority of clouds DC's are also power limited (i.e. either directly or indirectly via cooling limits), space is unlikely to be an issue.
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