I pulled an overnight last night to get our new SAN into a rack. We decided to purchase a fifth rack to make the move easier, and allow some room for expansion in the future. The whole process took two of us about 11 hours. The physical racking of the equipment was the easiest. The fact that we have around 275 virtual machines that use the SAN for their storage is what caused this to take so long. We made a few hardware changes which required us to do some reconfiguration on all of the virtual machines. Here are some pictures of the SAN in the rack.
Here is the SAN in its new home. As you can see we added a third disk enclosure. The disk enclosures hold 16 hard drives each. Below the SAN is the battery backup equipment. With the current power load this UPS will keep the SAN running for about an hour.
Here is the view from the back side of the rack. The SAN runs almost entirely on fiber cables, which are the orange cables in the picture here. I still have to tie the cables up to clean this up a little. At 7:00AM we decided this could wait until Monday since we were both ready to go home and sleep!
I haven’t done any cable management with the other racks yet. We are working to get a new data center approved. If that happens we will wait and clean up the mess when we move to the new space. All that really means is more over nights for me!
March 16, 2008 at 3:10 am
Wow.. this is freakin’ sweet! I am pretty much envious of what you get to do! This may sound rather stupid, as you’ve probably stated it before, but who is your employer again, and what exactly is your job function (aside from making sure the SAN is put in place correctly
)
Cable Management is my friend