Sun's 'Data Center Meltdown' Prediction

There's been a growing buzz in the IT blogosphere about a recent statement by Sun Microsystems' Subodh Bapat, who said the Internet would see "a massive failure within a year." Bapat, Sun's eco-computing vice president, said there would be a data center failure that would cause disruptions on the scale of the Morris Worm from 1988.

Bapat's comments were first noted on News.com, and have since been picked up by Nicholas Carr, Michael Krigsman, Deal Architect and Ashlee Vance at The Register, which had great fun with a headline about "voracious, collapsing data centers." Vinnie Mirchandani said the importance of Bapat's warning was missed or underplayed by the blogosphere and media.

Data center failures are newsworthy. That's why we write about them here at Data Center Knowledge. But what's new here? The only thing unusual about Bapat's prediction is the scope of the failure he's anticipating. Frankly, the Morris Worm doesn't strike fear into many hearts because it happened 20 years ago and didn't affect Main Street. Do you know anyone outside IT who remembers what they were doing when the Morris Worm struck?

To anticipate data center failures in 2008, one need only look at what has happened in 2007. Let's review the last six months:

In this context, the notion that a major failure will occur next year isn't exactly a stretch. I've also learned to be cautious about apocalyptic predictions from vendors. In the late 1990s I covered technology for a daily newspaper and wrote about the Y2K bug. Later at Netcraft I blogged about Internet security, and found that vendor predictions of imminent doom were a monthly event.

Failure happens, as noted by EYP's Richard Sawyer in a recent presentation at Data Center World, in which he urged a roomful of data center professionals to engineer their facilities to "fail small." The best way to fail small, he said, is to acknowledge that failure happens and design around it. In an industry that exists to keep data centers online all the time, Sawyer says being honest about the likelihood of failure is critical to developing effective mitigation strategies.

Yes, there will be data center failures in 2008. Whether any of them resemble the "meltdown" foreseen by Bapat depends upon the fences currently being built around the foreseeable risks and small failures that work together to create large failures.