seawolf Posted February 4, 2014 Posted February 4, 2014 Over the past 4 1/2 years we've put quite a bit of effort into getting our core infrastructure up to scratch. I've put together a little picture documentary (attached) showing how it has evolved since late 2009 to today. I'm sure there are some great setups out there in the community and I would love to see some of them. Or even if you just have what you wish was only a "Before" scenario and would like to get it to a "Now" condition and would like advice from people in the community who have been there and tackled many of the issues you will encounter (technical, financial, and with change management) and can assist with getting you to where you would like to be. 2
zag Posted February 4, 2014 Posted February 4, 2014 Awesome looks great and you actually cable managed haha How loud is and how much power does it use?
localzuk Posted February 4, 2014 Posted February 4, 2014 *grumble grumble* show off *grumble grumble* 1
buzybee Posted February 4, 2014 Posted February 4, 2014 Well Done !!!!!!! It looks very neat and tidy. Everthing in it's place, as it should be
Sheridan Posted February 4, 2014 Posted February 4, 2014 My budget wouldn't even allow for the floor to be painted!
X-13 Posted February 4, 2014 Posted February 4, 2014 [ATTACH=CONFIG]22668[/ATTACH] Question. Is that first picture [top left] a suitable space for hiding from teachers?
fiza Posted February 4, 2014 Posted February 4, 2014 Did you do it all in house? When did you find enough network downtime to do all of that?
sonofsanta Posted February 4, 2014 Posted February 4, 2014 I thought my UPSes actually ran off the static generated by the heavy duty 1970s carpet in my server room. Are you saying I could actually tile it instead? (I couldn't. I'm not dismantling the server rack to do it.)
seawolf Posted February 4, 2014 Author Posted February 4, 2014 Question. Is that first picture [top left] a suitable space for hiding from teachers? LOL. Well yes an average size person can fit in that space quite nicely. And the noise from the servers and switches provides nice cover as well.
seawolf Posted February 4, 2014 Author Posted February 4, 2014 Did you do it all in house? When did you find enough network downtime to do all of that? We did everything in house except for the cabling to the patch panels and the Lino flooring. For this last upgrade where we removed everything from the room and replaced the flooring, the system was down for 40 hours in total. We took it down on a Wednesday evening, pulled up the floor and painted until 2am. Floor was layed the following morning and we reinstalled everything the following morning. We had everything back in and spun up by the end of the day, although there was still a lot of temporary cabling between the servers and switches strung across the floor for a couple of days. The biggest delay was caused by having the flooring replaced, but it was time to get rid of the circa 1985 carpet once and for all. The original upgrade back in 2009/2010 consisted of replacing everything (nearly ever switch in 12 buildings, as well as all of the old Win 2000 servers that were running things at the time and creating a new domain and user accounts. That outage was much longer at around 18 days in total. I could only do something like that once or I would be strung up.
seawolf Posted February 5, 2014 Author Posted February 5, 2014 Awesome looks great and you actually cable managed haha How loud is and how much power does it use? The noise level in the server room is 79db standing at the racks. The equipment in the room consumes 480kWh per week or just over 2000kWh per month. 1
PotNoodleTech Posted February 5, 2014 Posted February 5, 2014 Very good job! I'm half way there (minus the datacentre paint and outstanding cable management!) but it's taken years as no big bang budget, have had to scrimp and save Gotta admit the Sun servers do look in a class above the rest. X4140/X4150s?
seawolf Posted February 5, 2014 Author Posted February 5, 2014 (edited) Very good job! I'm half way there (minus the datacentre paint and outstanding cable management!) but it's taken years as no big bang budget, have had to scrimp and save Gotta admit the Sun servers do look in a class above the rest. X4140/X4150s? Well, take heart. What you saw in the 2010 pics cost $47,000 all up including a day of work by an electrician, 4 days work for the data cabling (200 port frame to extend cables was required), the racks, two UPS, 3 servers, a SAN, a firewall, two switches, KVM, and all of the software licensing. No, 47k isn't a small chunk of change, but it took quite a bit of haggling to make it stretch far enough to do everything you see. The rack that you saw in the 2010 and today pics is the same rack, just with extra add-ones and modules I purchased for it. I like to buy gear that can expand and have a long lifespan. As for the Suns, we currently have one x4150, two x4170s (M1), a 7110 (4.2TB), two X3-2's, and a 7320 with a DE2-24P disk shelf. The X3-2s and 7320 were purchased in the past 4 months and serve as our core vSphere infrastructure. The others were purchased in Dec 2009. I'm using one of the older x4170 as a Hyper-V server and one as a backup server (Veeam and BackupAssist). The x4150 is used for testing and the 7110 is a backup emergency SAN as well as serving as storage for us in the IT Dept. I try to keep good equipment for as long as possible and have in the past had a 14 year old Sun Netra server that was still running as reliable as a Swiss watch. Edited February 5, 2014 by seawolf
Duke Posted February 6, 2014 Posted February 6, 2014 That's very awesome, nice work! Nice to see so many Sun boxes in there too, good kit.
PotNoodleTech Posted February 6, 2014 Posted February 6, 2014 Well, take heart. What you saw in the 2010 pics cost $47,000 all up including a day of work by an electrician, 4 days work for the data cabling (200 port frame to extend cables was required), the racks, two UPS, 3 servers, a SAN, a firewall, two switches, KVM, and all of the software licensing. No, 47k isn't a small chunk of change, but it took quite a bit of haggling to make it stretch far enough to do everything you see. The rack that you saw in the 2010 and today pics is the same rack, just with extra add-ones and modules I purchased for it. I like to buy gear that can expand and have a long lifespan. As for the Suns, we currently have one x4150, two x4170s (M1), a 7110 (4.2TB), two X3-2's, and a 7320 with a DE2-24P disk shelf. The X3-2s and 7320 were purchased in the past 4 months and serve as our core vSphere infrastructure. The others were purchased in Dec 2009. I'm using one of the older x4170 as a Hyper-V server and one as a backup server (Veeam and BackupAssist). The x4150 is used for testing and the 7110 is a backup emergency SAN as well as serving as storage for us in the IT Dept. I try to keep good equipment for as long as possible and have in the past had a 14 year old Sun Netra server that was still running as reliable as a Swiss watch. Yes that is the kind of money it would be nice to spend. I am going to have to make do with my 1 x 42u cab! Still running 2 x x4150 here and a 7110 (I have wiped it an repurposed it as a Win2k8 server running Veeam and a few other services). I'm running the Sun 146GB drives from our 7110s in my newer Dell servers. The sun stuff is very reliable, has one HDD fail out of 36 since 2009. Such a same they were taken over by Oracle "the Destroyer". We too run equipment past it's usual lifespan. Not usually through choice but through nessesity!
Pete10141748 Posted February 6, 2014 Posted February 6, 2014 Looks great, wish my upgrade had been as nice as that. Still, it was an improvement, going from this: the school's dumping ground where I sat with 1 laptop and 1 server with an UPS that had about 2 minutes of charging ability To this: Not pictured is the shelving at the end of the room, the aircon unit, and the cupboards to the left on the wall. [The room is too small to photo it all at once, apologies for my hurried spicing together of photos!] Next holiday I'm getting the cable management under control, and finally getting that old Dell server that my monitor is sitting on off my desk!
fiza Posted February 6, 2014 Posted February 6, 2014 Looks great, wish my upgrade had been as nice as that. Still, it was an improvement, going from this: [ATTACH=CONFIG]22734[/ATTACH] the school's dumping ground where I sat with 1 laptop and 1 server with an UPS that had about 2 minutes of charging ability To this: [ATTACH=CONFIG]22735[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]22736[/ATTACH] Not pictured is the shelving at the end of the room, the aircon unit, and the cupboards to the left on the wall. [The room is too small to photo it all at once, apologies for my hurried spicing together of photos!] Next holiday I'm getting the cable management under control, and finally getting that old Dell server that my monitor is sitting on off my desk! Do you buy everything from Amazon? That's a lot of Amazon boxes!!!
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