Nick Carr describes the new datacenter paradigm as a trailer park. Well, in the most pedantic meaning of the two words, he’s right.

Grab a ratty lawnchair and put a case of Busch cans in the cooler because the data center has now officially become the trailer park.

Poindexter, meet Jethro.

Both Sun and Rackable introduced supercomputers-in-shipping-containers some time ago, but it’s a move by Microsoft that pushes the trend into the mainstream. In its mammoth new data center in Chicago, reports Rich Miller, “Microsoft will forego a traditional raised-floor environment … and will instead fill one floor of the huge facility with up to 220 shipping containers packed with servers.” The “bold move,” says Miller, “is an affirmation of the potential for containers to address the most pressing power, cooling and capacity utilization challenges facing data center operators.” In designing the Chicago facility, Microsoft consulted with parking lot operators to ensure that semitrucks would be able to drive into the center and drop off the containers.

I do sincerely love the massiveness of this endeavour. All the web punks running around today laughed at us centralized datacenter mainframe dinosaurs, but please, tell me, how in the heck is this any different? Raised floor or not, the cooling required has simply got to be far beyond the range as the big mainframe farms where I baled hay (SYSOUT=$, anyone?) and wrangled multitudinous JES2 and SMF exits into MVS distributions and then herded them all over the range.

Big iron rules again, bitches. It always were so, and it always will be so. More so, in fact. You don’t think there’s really a cloud of social circle-jerk networks out there floating above the floor, weightless, do you? Hell, no — they gotta have datacenter they drive damn 18-wheelers into. Almost makes me wish I was back there still doing it.