Server Room

Click these for huge images if you wanted to get a close look at something, I figured I'd run through a bunch of stuff since I was in there rather than just the couple things we were talking about.

This is the AC, it's a 10 ton unit, which as I said was supposed to be ducted to blow down in front of the racks, but instead the baffles are aimed to shoot air into the cold-aisle. This seems to work very well. Scale-wise, that thing is 8' tall.

This is the cold-aisle with the fronts of the racks, this aisle is actually quite cool, as it should be.

The two shelves at the bottom of this rack are the array I was talking with you about. It's got 1 shelf of 15 2TB drives, then the top shelf has 5 more 2TB drives and 7 600GB 15k rpm drives. The two arrays above are two of the 3 SANs we have replaced with this new one. I'm going to use the larger one to create mass storage space (share drives) for other stuff that is less critical.

This next rack is kind of the bane of my existence, and it kind of makes me just sort of sag when I open the door. When we moved, my skills were needed elsewhere, and so in panic mode during the move, it was decided that neatness doesn't count. I'm about 40% of the way toward getting this thing cleaned up and all prettified. No desktop network connections terminate in this room, they are in IDF closets that I have down below. They connect back to these core switches with fiber. The cable guys ran 48 strands (24 pairs) of fiber to each closet, so I don't think we'll be hurting for bandwidth any time soon.

The back of that rack makes me much happier:

This rack is just pretty standard bunch of stuff we have racked up here. The two arrays at the bottom are DataDomain de-duplicating backup units. What this means is basically you can have a 6TB Datadomain, and get about 100TB effective storage out of it since it doesn't save duplicate data. They both mirror constantly to devices outside our office, bi-directionally. Aside from that moving up there is a monster email server, two database servers and other monitoring and infrastructure type stuff:

This is the back of it. Power is 220v from separate circuits off the APC below. The network cables aren't tucked away as they usually are because I had to run some stuff down and pulled them out:

Here you can see the cable trays for power and network. Each rack gets 2x220v/30a drops. The big round duct you can see toward the back is in case the room loses power, the generator we currently have doesn't have enough juice to run the AC, so when the temperature hits its set-point, big fans kick in and dump heat into the cubicle area which should buy us a few hours before things start overheating. The stuff bolted to the wall on the left is telecom handoff stuff, so fiber handoff from our ISP, T1 handoff for our phones, and an Asus eee-PC that runs a plasma display on the other side of the wall:

This next one is the battery that will provide a bridge between power loss and generator startup. The 16 batteries in the bottom need to be dealt with in pairs to provide 220v, so each pair is one "string". We'll probably add another rack of just all batteries sometime not too far down the line:

This is from behind those racks back toward the AC. You can see the cable ladder to the left, that's capacity for another row of racks, but we currently have a workbench and some storage racks which would have to move if we ever want to add more server racks. If we add more, the fronts of those racks will be facing the wall and the AC will blow air toward that, they will share the hot-aisle with the first row, so all racks will be dumping heat in the middle of the room lined up with that air return at the bottom of the AC:

Outside this server room, we have two distribution network closets serving desktops in the north and south wings of our building, here is one of them. These are before/after pictures, "before" is what happened when we ran out of patch cables mid-weekend and had to just grab anything of whatever length to get our users plugged in. "After" is after Natalie and I spent a day re-cabling the closets: