I'm back! Yay!
And what do I see on the Novell CoolBlogs?
Your Server Room. Looking for pictures of your pile of servers. We're actually in pretty good shape here at WWU, since we had a new datacenter built 5-6 years ago. We've fully Understood the joys of cable management and labeling. The rats nests of bygone years are a thing of the past. Sterile racks, cables managed to within an inch of their lives (have to leave a bit of wiggle room), and labels on everything. It just doesn't make for very interesting pictures, unless that's your thing.
No guarantees that the labels are correct, but we do go through and fix that a couple times a year. Not too shabby.
Our biggest problem is electrical, as our UPS is at 84% capacity as of this morning. Due to building codes in our area, and some fancy footwork on the part of the parties that built our building and datacenter, it is vastly cheaper to just add a second UPS to the room and not expand the capacity of the one we have. That's happening in the next few weeks, right before we get our new router core (Cisco 6500-series chassis, though the one going in our datacenter won't have a router module *pout*).
Thermally we're in pretty good shape. Our biggest problem right now is getting fully vented front doors. That'll do wonders to rack temperatures. Happily, our few really dense racks already have fully perfed doors. Unhappily, we do have some racks with internal temperatures at the server air-intakes of 85 degrees; that is within operating spec so we're not panicking too hard. Just not best-practice, and we know. We know from experience that if one of our two AC units quits the room raises in temperature by 7 degrees, so except for the racks with the 85 degree internal temps everything else is still within operating spec. Plenty of room for expansion there as well.
And what do I see on the Novell CoolBlogs?
Your Server Room. Looking for pictures of your pile of servers. We're actually in pretty good shape here at WWU, since we had a new datacenter built 5-6 years ago. We've fully Understood the joys of cable management and labeling. The rats nests of bygone years are a thing of the past. Sterile racks, cables managed to within an inch of their lives (have to leave a bit of wiggle room), and labels on everything. It just doesn't make for very interesting pictures, unless that's your thing.
No guarantees that the labels are correct, but we do go through and fix that a couple times a year. Not too shabby.
Our biggest problem is electrical, as our UPS is at 84% capacity as of this morning. Due to building codes in our area, and some fancy footwork on the part of the parties that built our building and datacenter, it is vastly cheaper to just add a second UPS to the room and not expand the capacity of the one we have. That's happening in the next few weeks, right before we get our new router core (Cisco 6500-series chassis, though the one going in our datacenter won't have a router module *pout*).
Thermally we're in pretty good shape. Our biggest problem right now is getting fully vented front doors. That'll do wonders to rack temperatures. Happily, our few really dense racks already have fully perfed doors. Unhappily, we do have some racks with internal temperatures at the server air-intakes of 85 degrees; that is within operating spec so we're not panicking too hard. Just not best-practice, and we know. We know from experience that if one of our two AC units quits the room raises in temperature by 7 degrees, so except for the racks with the 85 degree internal temps everything else is still within operating spec. Plenty of room for expansion there as well.