Show Us Your Racks

Here we go then, a harmless dev platform with no labling or anything. Interestingly I was told today by the company who makes the storage kit that we're their second largest customer - after NASA.

10Gbit ethernet switches and 43.6TB of storage in this platform...

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Yes, I like my cabling to be neat...apart from that serial cable hanging down...
 
Marky said:
Nice cable management - and thats a lot of space :p
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The space wasn't the thing, the enclosures will take 750GB drives (support for 1TB drives isn't far off either) but we only use 250GB because we want the IOPs performance rather than the space. 10 enclosures of 16 disks each - 120TB possible from that and the system can be expanded further with additional controllers.
 
I work for the NHS in IT (only helpdesk/techie stuff) and have to go to our servers rooms now again. They are horrible places. I really feel for the techies who have to work in there for any length of time.

That said though, there is some pretty neat kit. We've a SAN with god-knows how many HDDs in it. Mostly Dell and IBM stuff.

The best thing about the server room is a pc that isn't Websense'd. Full internets at work!
 
I am so tempted to get a few pics of switch and server rooms at the college I work at. Honestly I don't think you would believe the state of them... I think the switch loose in the racking suspended on a shere mass of cat5 spiderweb would probably be the most poetic.
 
TheMorningStar said:
I am so tempted to get a few pics of switch and server rooms at the college I work at. Honestly I don't think you would believe the state of them... I think the switch loose in the racking suspended on a shere mass of cat5 spiderweb would probably be the most poetic.
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unfortunately thats an all to easy bad habbit to get into. especially if youre worked off your feet.. "oh i'll just bung this cable in and come back later to tidy it". the previous techies here had adopted that method until we came in and ripped it all out, starting from scratch. not a fun job believe me.. lol
 
Wardie said:
Just out of curiosity, where do the rest of you who can't show your racks work?
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A large and well known ISP who has hosting services used by some very large and well known brands.

Dist said:
garp although you make it sound like an awfull job, personly i would still love to do a job like that. And you mention that it doesnt take a great deal of skill, but what about when you need to upgrade all your routers/switches to a newer model (i know this wont happen often, maybe once every few years, or sooner if you are constantly expanding) in a data centre environment i bet someone with just a CCNA wouldnt get on too well with replacing the old routers with new ones (unless of course its a simple matter of transfering the settings from old to new instead of creating the settings from scratch).
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Data centre guys don't touch routers much. That's what networks guys are for. At most in a disaster circumstance all a data centre guy would have to do is plug in a replacement router and just do the bare minimum to allow a networks guy in remotely. Generally networks guys will have a consoling machine somewhere near routers too, so in most circumstances all you'd do would be physically swap the routers and cables over, plug in a console cable and leave it well alone; that's it. My CCNA has for the most part sat gathering dust. Out of what I learnt by doing it there are only a few things I've used, basic configuration stuff (re-labelling ports, basic IP changes, duplex changes and the like), interface stats checking (looking for data corruption), IP address route checking (for hunting down 'missing' boxes), and log checking (looking for flapping lines or ports). That's it as far as someone in a DC is ever really likely to need. Routing gets handled by IS-IS and BGP for the most part which the CCNA course doesn't currently cover, and pretty much runs itself anyway. Router upgrades are very very few and far between (well they are if your network guys are smart), and you'd upgrade them only in stages anyway. Last time my company did a router upgrade the networks guys handled it themselves anyway just in case there were problems.

I don't want to appear like I'm trying to put you off the work or environment, I just don't want you to approach it with false impressions of what's entailed.
 
Decided to photo the racks i look after, theres 1 more rack in another room but im too lazy to go and take a photo of it

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a little bit messy as the rack on the right, which is only about 6months old, is still having new servers put into it, took this only 2 days after installing the bottom one (which happens to be the most powerful one at 8 core xeon with 4gb ram)

completely overhauled the network here in the past year, theres 2 old dell servers down bottom left which are both running linux, the left rack used to be full of celeron and P3 dell servers *shivers at the thought of going back to that*
 
Marky said:
Nice cable management - and thats a lot of space :p
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to add actually, thats one of our storage platforms but we had the suppliers in this week (a few issues I wanted ironed out) and they've told me that in terms of storage deployed we're their second biggest customer - after NASA. Thats a little bit cool.

All my design and I'm responsible for overall management, and only NASA have a bigger one - that'll be making it's way onto my CV.
 
bigredshark said:
to add actually, thats one of our storage platforms but we had the suppliers in this week (a few issues I wanted ironed out) and they've told me that in terms of storage deployed we're their second biggest customer - after NASA. Thats a little bit cool.

All my design and I'm responsible for overall management, and only NASA have a bigger one - that'll be making it's way onto my CV.
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Haha awesome :D
 
Aw man, this makes me want to go to work instead of be at uni. I remember when I done a 2 weeks placement a few years ago and I had access to a room full of server racks, probably about 10-15 racks. I can still remember the access code for the door, adn I was 1 of about 4 people in the whole building that knew it.

Really cant wait for uni to end now, starting to get fed up.
 
Stellios said:
Aw man, this makes me want to go to work instead of be at uni. I remember when I done a 2 weeks placement a few years ago and I had access to a room full of server racks, probably about 10-15 racks. I can still remember the access code for the door, adn I was 1 of about 4 people in the whole building that knew it.

Really cant wait for uni to end now, starting to get fed up.
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Trust me, it's really nowhere near as cool as you think long term. I spend the absolute minimum possible time in the datacentre. It's noisy, dry, either too hot or too cold depending where you sit and generally annoying.

When I can pay enough people that I never have to venture in there, I'll be a very happy nerd :).
 
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