I’m working on my next tip, but it won’t be ready until next week. So for this week I thought I would share my next big project at work. I for a company in southern Minnesota. I have been at this company for almost seven years now. My actual job title is a little obscure, but it is best described as Junior Network Administrator, basically I’m second in command as far as our IT department is concerned. One of my duties is to physically mount hardware in the equipment racks, which is what this project will involve. Below I’ve included pictures that will hopefully give you an idea of just how much work I’m in for!
Here is a view of the front of the racks in our data center. We are a small to medium sized business, and currently have four server racks that are reaching capacity. One reason we are able to fit all of our servers into four racks is that we use VMWare to virtualize our servers. Basically what this means is that we are running 23 virtual servers on 3 phyisical servers. This saves us a lot of money, space, and energy.
Here’s where the hard work is going to come into play! This is the view from the back of the server racks, A.K.A. “The Rat’s Nest”, A.K.A. “The Spagetti Monster”. The part of this project that will take me the longest is cleaning up this mess!
This is our new Compellent SAN (Storage Area Network) this is basically a bunch of hard drives that can be accessed via the network. We have another SAN that is identical to this one, but is already in the rack. I need to get this one off this shelf and into a server rack. Before that can be done, I need to either move some of our existing servers and equipment around to make room, or we need to puchase a fifth rack.
I don’t know if I’ll finish this before the semester is over or not, mainly because all this work needs to be done during nights when no one is working so we can take the servers and SAN down. If I do any work, I will update my progress here.
March 1, 2008 at 10:46 pm
This is freakin’ amazing! I love the pictures, and thats a pretty sweet gig you got goin’ on there! That rat nest picture is quite typical, and amuses me.
March 5, 2008 at 1:38 am
Wow, good luck with that Rats nest. We have something similar where I work but I deal mostly with the computers and software and not the server and networking. I have not worked much with VMWare but hope to more in the future. We have tried it with one of our license servers but did not get it to work yet.
March 5, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Hey these pictures are awesome! All of this equipment looks extremely complicated it must take a pretty smart guy to know how to work all of this stuff. The rats nest picture is amazing… how many chords/wires are in that pic?
March 5, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Jordy,
VMWare it tricky to get working, but once you have it working, it’s nice. We currently have two ESX clusters, one cluster runs about 23 virtual servers, the other runs approx. 250 virtual workstations that users RDP into from WYSE terminals.
Darren,
I’m not sure how many cables there are, but there are a lot. Most of them come from the top, hang down, and go back to the top of the racks, so most of the network cables look like two in the pic.
I know that even if I clean this up it will someday be back to something similar to this. We often have to make quick fixes, and that never includes cable management!
March 8, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Wow, thats alot of wires and cables for a small to medium company, i cant imagine seeing a large companies server racks. Im not going to lie i have never seen the back of a server rack like that and it is pretty cool to see.
April 16, 2008 at 1:20 am
I can feel your pain on this one my friend. A while back my company underwent the same thing and I had to install a new SAN in our server racks, I still have nightmares about that. We were running 7 racks and I don’t think anyone had straightened up the back of the servers since they were installed, a new guy could have been trapped in a wiring mess for months.