Microsoft seeking robots to help automate datacenters

Microsoft is on the hunt for a team manager with robotics experience to work on the automation of datacenter operations, just weeks after blaming an outage at its Australia facility on having insufficient staff available. Broken cloud Microsoft admits slim staff and broken automation contributed to Azure outage READ MORE …

[Lurko]

What became of "lights out" DCs?

I thought DC designers had been aiming to eradicate BOFHs for a very long time, apparently with no more success than military planners hoping to replace jet jockeys with missiles?

What am I not understanding here?

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: What became of "lights out" DCs?

I read of one vhost company decades ago whose DC was made of plywood shelving holding pizza-box PCs, each of which had front-mounted reboot, power, and hot-swap drive cages (just one drive per PC). They had the security guard doing the drive swaps and PC power-cycles and reboots. Given the mentality of many security guards, I wondered how many hard drives were "replaced" upside-down, and how many wrong boxes were power-cycled.

[elsergiovolador]

ID IoTs

$133,600 to $256,800, the company said, although San Francisco and New York are apparently special cases where the pay grade is $173,200 - $282,200 per year.

They should come to the UK, they could hire engineers for $33,600 to $56,800 and in London for $73,200 - $82,200.

They could go even lower, as engineers would happily work from their shoebox for a lower salary (to avoid bed bugs on public transport).

[Boris the Cockroach]

Sounds fairly easy

to me.

Take 1 rack of servers, attach a target above each reboot button, strap a vision system to the robot's hand so it can locate the target and an air operated plunger below the camera presses the reboot button once the robot arm is in position.

On the other side of the hand would be the HDD removal/replacement tool. using the same sort of target/camera system to locate itself.

There all your DC problems sorted and not a fleshy meatbag in sight

[probgoblin]

Re: Sounds fairly easy

Imagining half of the Office 365 users on the east coast going dark because the camera arm got tangled into some cabling and pushing the power button on the racks it's amputated from the network every 30 seconds, waiting for them to come back on.

[An_Old_Dog]

WfH Percentage

"Up to 100% [WfH]" includes "0%". The issue is whether the percentage of WfH time is at Microsoft's discretion, or at the employee's discretion.