No I run an IT department for a legal 500 Intellectual property firm, I believe it is one of the oldest IP firms in the country. We just happen to have a load of kit located in our London datacenter that now needs to move to our colo DC. While we are at it we will put 100 of these in and an RDS session host. At that point what is the need for an office?
Project Whurple - White/Purple Watercooled Build - Changes to 3d printer build!!
- Thread starter Vince
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No I run an IT department for a legal 500 Intellectual property firm, I believe it is one of the oldest IP firms in the country. We just happen to have a load of kit located in our London datacenter that now needs to move to our colo DC. While we are at it we will put 100 of these in and an RDS session host. At that point what is the need for an office?
Keeps me playing with all the best toys. I was literally one of the first in the country to get my hands on EPYC rome
Love our Rome servers absolute beasts.Lucky to still be workinv for sure and with interesting techie projects on.
Meet my naples, amd gave me a couple of these to upgrade my servers that were shipped with the wrong bios:
And they let me keep them. Good guys over at amd / hp they even let me go to a closed vendor event a few years back where we raced cars around Mercedes test track. To be fair that was partly facilitated by a disti I have a very long relationship with.
You moving to Milan, Vince? I mean EPYC, not the city
Most likely, i have the sockets available.
Same size as the threadripper in my desktop.
They are big 4094 pins. Big boy cpu's! Ill grab a pic of the underside of that bad boy so you can see.
And a couple of my build:
These are from when I ended up buying quite a few different x399 boards to try and find one that wasn't a mess for esxi when threadripper first released.
Some more processors, rome is blue, naples green:
Then the rack where they live at the moment, from top to bottom in this pic dual epyc 7452 rome 192gb of ram per processor each one only has one processor seated at the moment and space for a ton more ram, this is the ten year plan and has huge scope for upgrades, second is the same, 3rd is a darktrace appliance which is a network based artificial intelligence appliance, ill show you a screenshot later, its properly cool, then there is a dedicated backup appliance which is a storeonce 4500 24tb, it has an identical sister appliance at the colo. under that are a pair of FC Brocade switches and finally another EPYC chassis. I probably have a picture of the disk infrastructure as well somewhere. Put simply this is scalable infrastructure for the back end stuff. Disk wise it's connected to around 80 odd 10k rpm 600gb spindal disks in an EVA (enterprise vault array) which to be honest is the biggest bottleneck at this point and which another disk failed in again today. luckily 2 were delivered today and another 3 will turn up tomorrow so I am set for a few more failures, they tend to go on rebuilds when you put a load of extra stress across the disks, especially in larger disk groups.
Cant find any pics on the disk arrays but here is an example of one of my disk groups:
The DMS group has a failure atm but the setup can handle multiple simultaneous failures on any given tray at any one time up to a maximum of around, well, it's complicated and depends on provisioning how close the disks are to one another in physical proximity and some other variables but it is much more resilient than a traditional raid configuration. I have experienced 3 simultaneous failures on the same group same night, that was on a group of around 48 disks and no data loss, no downtime. EVA even today is a very good storage solution.
Inside an Epyc chassis, none of my chassis have any storage save for an SD card, storage is provided over 10gb FC.
Just for good measure, some darktrace active threat analysis and network traffic analysis of my network right now, I have had to heavily chop the images but now when I say it's cool I am sure you will agree:
All the little dots on the right hand side of the firewall are mostly people home working over the last 24 hours. I have multiple vlans/lans over multiple sites so the boxes teal and different shades of blue in the background are the additional fortigates located at places like my house and are shown inside the firewall. The main firewall is a fortigate as well with all of the good stuff enabled.
This basically works off of the back of my core switches which replicate traffic on all ports back to the appliance so the AI can work it's magic, it has active threat management so can stop traffic before it does any damage.
Caught it at a pretty good time as the network is running its backup and replication routines until around 5am.
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Those pretty much be my toys and the infrastructure I spent the last 7 or so years perfecting and tuning! I don't have photos of the 3 phase 2.5 metric ton ups that powers it but lets just say that It's resilient to any failure with redundant routes through the whole stack including power, lose an epyc server, no worries it will fix itself so quickly that if you take a breath you might not notice
It's quite a lot of infrastructure for such a small company but we take tech seriously! I also work with engineers, scientists, chemists etc so a lot of the people I work with are invested already and understand that we need to keep investing in our infrastructure if you want to count on it when, like now, it is really needed and needs to be 100% reliable.
It's just kind of sad as I designed the London dc which sits inside our office but hides away behind closed doors, it's only relatively small and can hold 5 racks while still having a work bench etc but everything from it's power requirements/delivery to the layout and design was to my exact spec, the air con systems card entry systems everything. It even has it's own separate alarm system
I know you shouldn't get too caught up in these sorts of things and it's just a job or whatever but it keeps me in the things I like and I love what I do. I am trusted to get on and do the right things and guide the team to the correct decisions using the budget made available to me and I genuinely believe we have some of the best infrastructure and systems when compared to our peers and even firms twice our size.
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Right so you have all been eagerly awaiting some 3d print stuff etc but sadly other things have been on the cards over the last few days which has mainly been focused on getting the office in more of a position where it can house myself and the wife more comfortably. So I dismantled and took out the sofa ready for the tip, set up the desk with her machine, put all of her work software on it and copied over all her profiles etc. Set up an area for her on the NAS, configured her machine for some volume shadow copies etc so I think we are fully set to go now. Still some painting to do, lights to put up and a radiator cover to make as well as a few other small bits and then the former minging pink granny anex is done. Got a plan for a cool table made out of this old cool crate box thing the wifes grandad gave me before he sadly passed away so also going to make a coffee table from that, it is a bit fragile though and needs a little work so perhaps that something for another day.
that looks great mate
Hers is almost a mini sort of version of mine but with her own little twist. We do have the same mouse and webcam and thats about it. I think she is going to pick some art and we will put her some shelves up but I think so far it's looking decent. Our own little office at home
Well Whurple didn't last long and it's fate in the end was down to that gpu riser cable. Burned through the cable and it's taken the cpu and also the board with it. I have a new board which turned up today and also a new cpu which will get here tomorrow. the 2700x is no more so we are now going 3600. With the new board comes better options for stuff so I am also going to have to rework all of the cooling.
So far what I know for sure is these parts are done:
ASRock B450m hdv
Ryzen 2700x
Riser Cable
The gpu is absolutely fine as I tested it in my machine and as far as I can tell the psu is also fine as I have powered up another machine from it no issue, the memory who knows Im not risking sticking it in my machine so we wait until sunday to find out. So new parts:
B450 Aorus M
Ryzen 3600
On the way
10 right angle white fittings
4 lengths of tubing.
While I am waiting she is going on air!
So far what I know for sure is these parts are done:
Ryzen 2700x
Riser Cable
The gpu is absolutely fine as I tested it in my machine and as far as I can tell the psu is also fine as I have powered up another machine from it no issue, the memory who knows Im not risking sticking it in my machine so we wait until sunday to find out. So new parts:
B450 Aorus M
Ryzen 3600
On the way
10 right angle white fittings
4 lengths of tubing.
While I am waiting she is going on air!
It sucks but it will be better for it ryzen 3600 just turned up and that aorus board is quite nice, certainly a lot better than the cheapest b450 you can buy in the asrock hdv. I also have an msi board turning up so might just send that back or put it on the members market.
Yep cheap chinese riser, but id also bent it over quite a bit to fit which probably helped kill it to be fair. I've already got a replacement in a Kolink one from overclockers so am ready to build it back up again tomorrow. Going out with the wife for the day/evening so won't get the time until then. I've decided I want a bit of a different look in the cooling as well so it's all going to change
ryzen 3600 just turned up and that aorus board is quite nice, certainly a lot better than the cheapest b450 you can buy in the asrock hdv. I also have an msi board turning up so might just send that back or put it on the members market.Yep cheap chinese riser, but id also bent it over quite a bit to fit which probably helped kill it to be fair. I've already got a replacement in a Kolink one from overclockers so am ready to build it back up again tomorrow. Going out with the wife for the day/evening so won't get the time until then. I've decided I want a bit of a different look in the cooling as well so it's all going to change
It's possible and its been apart a lot due to issues with mayhems pastel cooling splitting and depositing itself all over the system. Mayhems hooked me up with blitz kit etc but it's been pulled apart at least 5 or 6 times. With the new board I might have some clearance at the top of the case so there might be better radiator options, I also don't want bent tubing at all so have bought the fittings so that I can just do straight runs.
Not yet sure what I am going to do with the gpu or where it is to be mounted but it is absolutley fine in terms of functioning.
Had a chat with a friend of mine at AMD who suggested I just RMA the cpu. So that is exactly what I have tried to do, will let you know how I get on. Even if it doesn't work out I am ok with that. Going to have a go at a rebuild today
Nope she is staying purple! She is booting up nicely right now. Just cleaned up some of the inside, removed all the cooling and set her up on the stock AMD fan. We are changing the res, pipework and fittings I think! The new board is significantly better than the old one though.
Hopefully AMD will send me another 2700x or something and I can then do something with that. Might also RMA the asrock board if they will let me.
Pi
Pita it happened
But whurple V2 will be even better than V1 was
Oh for sure! I am not even angry. These things happen and it's just about learning where you can go cheap and where you can't. Gpu riser is probably one of those areas where you shouldn't
Just knocking it back together, going to change the cord on her model O mouse (yes i got her a purple one), then give it a quick clean and ill post up how she looks now
Also guess what... The rad now clears the ram at the top of the case
The entire system will now get a rework!! This also clears space for another 2 fans at the front of the case.
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Well that's a nice bonus with the rad
Looking forward to the pics
Here we have it.. up and running!!! Its nippy this little 3600. I approve!!
There are also a couple of chips in the paint down this side of the room where i keep knocking things into the wall. My painting skills need some work thats for sure!! Normally the keyboard is bluetooth but it needed to be plugged in for the setup in the new board. So far im happy that the wife is back up and running for work tomorrow.
She wouldn't have been happy back on a 14/15" laptop over wifi, there had been a marked difference in the amount of being annoyed at the work setup since changing over.