World-Class DataCenter in 4 Days
Well, time for my first nerdy posting.
I work in the Engineering Computing group for a semiconductor company, as a Unix Sysadmin / App Developer / Metalworker / Manual Laborer / whatever the job requires. Our group, consisting of 6 people, supports our worldwide engineering computing infrastructure for 15 sites worldwide.
We just acquired a company in India, and on Tuesday, we were tasked with putting together a complete datacenter and shipping by Friday! Well, fortunately we made it (with absolutely no time to spare) and now its (hopefully) on a plane to India.
Take a look at the pictures below, this would be every nerd’s dream (and it also doubles as a heater!). It has 10 dual-Opteron’s with 8GB memory, 6 UltraSparcIII services boxes, and 6 dual-Xeon 4GB ram systems. Of course, there’s the standard out-of-band management, network switch, manged power supplies, and cabling. When we get them in, we’ll be sending out another rack, equipped with a 48 port gigabit ethernet switch, NetApp filer with 2 TeraByte capacity, cisco router, and a couple more compute servers. All the people in India have to do is plugin a network cable, a couple power cables, and they’ll be up and running.
It was quite a project, but the most challenging was getting this thing out of our building. The complete assembly weighs a good 1000+ lbs, and we had to get this 8ft moster into our elevator, which as a 7ft door opening. We had to tilt the thing and wheel it in (and out), without crushing ourselves and/or losing $200k of equipment. Needless to say, I didn’t need to hit the gym today. Who says a bunch of nerds can’t hold their own in on the physical side of things!
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