Wrapping it up.

This is the last post for my Tech. Comm. class. Since my most popular posts were those about my job I thought I would talk about that a little more. We will not be cleaning up the mess of cables in the data center as we are making plans to build a new data center. Our current data center now contains five server racks, and four, two post racks containing network switches, patch panels and routers. The four, two post racks will stay in there current location as it would be far too costly to relocate the network cables.

The main reason we are moving to a new data center is to get adequate cooling and power. The new data center will have the capacity for approximately 20 server racks. We will have generator backup power as well as battery backup. There will also be redundant cooling with about 10 times the capacity of our current location. The company is growing very quickly, and we are currently building a new location. It is important for us to make these changes now so we have room to expand as needed.

Back to the cable nightmare. We will be going into our new data center with completely new patch cables. They will be custom made to the length needed so we won’t have the problem we have now with large amounts of extra cable that needs to be managed. It’s going to be a long process, but I’m looking forward to getting into a room that is designed to house servers instead of a room that has been adapted the best it could to be a server room.

 

Half of the project done.

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!

My next project at work

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.