At Usenix ATC’16 last week, there was a “best of the rest” session which repeated selected papers presented at FAST’16 earlier this year. One that caught my interest was discussing disk reliability in free cooled data centers at Microsoft (Environmental conditions and disk reliability in free-cooled datacenters, see pp. 53-66).
The paper discusses disk reliability at 9 different datacenters in Microsoft for over 1M drives over the course of 1.5 to 4 years vs. how datacenters were cooled.
Continue reading “Surprises in disk reliability from Microsoft’s “free cooled” datacenters”