Show Us Your Racks

Wardie said:
I'm envious of the experience some people get at smaller places. They have to know a LOT more and have a wider knowledge base. It's really worth doing something like that for a couple of years, the experience you get would be very valuable.

When you work at a larger place it's much more specialsed. The network team don't have time to be worrying about looking after servers as well.
Click to expand...


I am with you :)

I work with ~20 servers and 125 users over 5 sites and I am the only IT person here :eek:

I am very busy as you can imagine and we do pretty much everything in house, very rarely have consultants or engineers in, so I have a vast range of experience, from installing new servers, racks, networks, storage. Unix & windows systems, email, IIS, SQL etc etc. I love the variety, which is, looking at the job pages, very rare indeed. Every job I have looked at in the past 6 months is for a specific area, like Network Admin, Database admin. There are very few jobs like mine about, which is going to make it hard to move on :(
 
In my experience smaller teams means broader but shallower knowledge than dedicated teams, and with it not necessarily the best solutions implemented as the ones getting broad knowledge don't know deep enough to get the more complicated but better solutions going.

Baz said:
I work with ~20 servers and 125 users over 5 sites and I am the only IT person here :eek:
Click to expand...

In theory you shouldn't have to touch those servers very often, most of your work should be with the end users. 2 of us at work are responsible for somewhere over 400 servers, doing a variety of functions, some of which are seeing very heavy use, though admittedly in a worst case scenario we've got another couple of people we can call on to help. Of those only maybe a dozen require any regular poking and that's because they're badly set-up and technically End of Life, so we're not wasting time re-engineering them.
 
Garp said:
In my experience smaller teams means broader but shallower knowledge than dedicated teams, and with it not necessarily the best solutions implemented as the ones getting broad knowledge don't know deep enough to get the more complicated but better solutions going.
Click to expand...
That is true, I would say I know enough about setting up everything we have and troubleshooting it, but I am no expert in any particular field, very good in some yes, but no expert, hence external support contracts ;)

garp said:
In theory you shouldn't have to touch those servers very often, most of your work should be with the end users. 2 of us at work are responsible for somewhere over 400 servers, doing a variety of functions, some of which are seeing very heavy use, though admittedly in a worst case scenario we've got another couple of people we can call on to help. Of those only maybe a dozen require any regular poking and that's because they're badly set-up and technically End of Life, so we're not wasting time re-engineering them.
Click to expand...

That is the only reason I have to do anything on the servers, we have some old kit, and kit that has been messed about with a fair bit so a few servers fall over sometimes. The other server tinkering is usually as the goal posts change and something needs changing :p
 
If only you guys could see the Datacentres I work for.... our flagship site is one of the most impressive halls I have ever seen. We've just put 2 x APC cubes in there full of blades....the hot isle is waaaarrrmmmmm...

We can't even take cameras on site though cos of the government kit in there. I'll find out if there are any "official" photos that are allowed for external viewing tomorrow and post them.
 
same here

Albo said:
If only you guys could see the Datacentres I work for.... our flagship site is one of the most impressive halls I have ever seen. We've just put 2 x APC cubes in there full of blades....the hot isle is waaaarrrmmmmm...

We can't even take cameras on site though cos of the government kit in there. I'll find out if there are any "official" photos that are allowed for external viewing tomorrow and post them.
Click to expand...

Yeah same issues here. I work for a very large multinational, we have multiple datacentres all around. To be honest half the time I don't even know where my own servers are, I'm one of those specialised monkeys that only cares about my own little world.
 
Baz said:
I am with you :)

I work with ~20 servers and 125 users over 5 sites and I am the only IT person here :eek:

I am very busy as you can imagine and we do pretty much everything in house, very rarely have consultants or engineers in, so I have a vast range of experience, from installing new servers, racks, networks, storage. Unix & windows systems, email, IIS, SQL etc etc. I love the variety, which is, looking at the job pages, very rare indeed. Every job I have looked at in the past 6 months is for a specific area, like Network Admin, Database admin. There are very few jobs like mine about, which is going to make it hard to move on :(
Click to expand...

im in the same boat as you basicly, 20 servers, 500-600 PCs, 1000-1200 students and teachers, though theres 3 of us to manage this one site

we've only just done a complete overhaul on this network, one year ago the fastest server we had was a 2xP3 1ghz, now the server rooms kitted out will all brand new HP proliant kit, seperate DCs for each section of the site, network cablings been refitted in places, all the switches replaced with procurves

its great fun learning all the things required to accomplish the upgrade we've done, i get to toy with everything under the sun, the only limiting factor about my computing ways is the fact i simply cannot learn unix systems, im bored to death at even the thought of it :(

its going to be very hard moving on from this job, ive only been here nigh on 2 years so its not like im in a hurry to leave but i really need a better paying job, the fact lifes so easy here makes that really difficult
 
Garp said:
In my experience smaller teams means broader but shallower knowledge than dedicated teams, and with it not necessarily the best solutions implemented as the ones getting broad knowledge don't know deep enough to get the more complicated but better solutions going.



In theory you shouldn't have to touch those servers very often, most of your work should be with the end users. 2 of us at work are responsible for somewhere over 400 servers, doing a variety of functions, some of which are seeing very heavy use, though admittedly in a worst case scenario we've got another couple of people we can call on to help. Of those only maybe a dozen require any regular poking and that's because they're badly set-up and technically End of Life, so we're not wasting time re-engineering them.
Click to expand...

True Garp, but I still think if someone gets that sort of experience while they are still young it's pretty valuable. In my opinion it's best to get a broad knowledge initially and then you can specialise from there, it can only help you.
 
Heh. My rack + server in my spare room.

myrack.jpg


Lovely mess on the bottom.
 
Wish I could post pics but I'd be strung up. Especially if it was the datacentre.

You know its serious when the health and safety briefing tells you how many seconds you have to get out once the fire klaxon sounds, before all oxygen is removed from the room and replaced by non flammable gas :/
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom