New Facility
Going to the new facility we cut down to four racks of space which was made very much possible by moving from our old 3U 1850 and DL380s we purchased in around 2001, to new DL360 G5s which are 1U. I can run about 4 virtual servers of similar memory and processor on the newer low end DL360 in 1U space as 4 3Us of 1850s took up, not to mention the faster speed of all the components and the fact that it’s a beast to try to get an recent OS release running on hardware that old. My work isn’t done at the new facility but here’s how it’s shaping up right now.
I’ve managed to keep the backs of the racks fairly clean and not have tons of cord wads back there. I removed all of the 6 foot power cords in preference to 3 foot ones as the longer ones ended up leaving a huge mass of cord bundles blocking air flow at the rear.
The fronts of the racks look better, mainly due to the fact of the switch to more G5 servers which are on the bottom. The G1 and 1850 servers located on top need to go soon and there are plans to get all the applications that remain on them off, we just need the time to get the portage done.
The network gear rack still has the most physical work to be done. I wish I would have gotten the cable management in earlier but as I wasn’t sure what I wanted and hadn’t done this before it’s getting done later rather than earlier. The Extreme switch should get hooked up tonight and one of the three PIXs and a small switch should get removed while we then switch over to the other two. Standard at the new facility is CAT6 wiring, this may be a bit overblown for things such as the console cables to the network gear, they could run on lesser wiring but I think in the interest of keeping it clear it will be better to create of a standard and stick to it so everything is the same. There is a set of patch panels which run one on the network rack to one on each server rack so that there will be no cable running from rack to rack to plug things in. There’s a trade off by having more cable to cable connections from the switch to the server but I think signal degradation should be minimized by having CAT6 in there. The amount hassle saved by just plugging to a patch panel in both the network and server cabinet will justify this and the potential for creating problem by tracing cords back and forth will be eliminated in this scenario. Also in many instances the network gear ends up facing in the opposite direction of your servers and thus the idea of hot and cold isles runs into problems when you cable servers and switches directly together, so this should keep both pieces of hardware breathing cold air. This is the network rack in it’s early stages.
So that’s where I’m at now, by the middle of July I hope to have it cleaned up more, maybe I’ll install some neon underglow in the cabinets so they are rock star cool 😉