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So you want to build your own data center

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131–140 of 287 posts

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#131
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was one day we knocked out windows and purchased box fans because servers were literally catching on fire. Pointing the fans in or out?

You want to point them in.

The datacenters I've been in with emergency cooling fans in the walls all exhaust out, not in. Easier to get portable CRACs inside and get a good draft going.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#132

Reminds me of the old Rackspace days! Boy we had some war stories: - Some EMC guys came to install a storage device for us to test... and tripped over each other and knocked out an entire Rack of servers like a comedy skit. (They uh... didn't win the contract.) - Some poor guy driving a truck had a heart attack and the crash took our DFW datecenter offline. (There were ballards to prevent this sort of scenario, but t…

We had a bird land on a transformer up on a pole and blew fuses. A couple years later, I toured the facility and the fried carcass was still there on the ground below it.

Left as a warning to other birds, no doubt.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#133

Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?

Come to my office and tell me how it’s not actually my office because it’s leased by my company from the investment vehicle for institutional investors that owns the building that stands on land owned by someone else again that was stolen by the British anyway and therefore calling it “my office” makes me a fool and a liar and I should just “say what I mean”.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#134

We went down this path over the last year, lots of our devs need local and dev/test environments and AWS was costing us a bomb, With about 7 Bare metals(Colocation) we are running about 200+ VMs and could double that number with some capacity to spare. For management, we built a simple wrapper over libvirt. I am setting up another rack in the US and will end up costing around $75Kper year for a similar capacity. Our…

Sounds like a good chunk of money saved, but are you getting the same level of redundancy as you did on the cloud?

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#135

Reminds me of the old Rackspace days! Boy we had some war stories: - Some EMC guys came to install a storage device for us to test... and tripped over each other and knocked out an entire Rack of servers like a comedy skit. (They uh... didn't win the contract.) - Some poor guy driving a truck had a heart attack and the crash took our DFW datecenter offline. (There were ballards to prevent this sort of scenario, but t…

> and purchased box fans because servers were literally catching on fire

Ah yes, or a collection of R2D2 portable air conditioners, with the tails draped out through the window.

Or a coolant leak that no one noticed until the sub-floor was completely full and the floor panels started to float!

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying I don't agree with you but most tech businesses that have their own "Data center" usually have a private cage in a Colo.

They usually don’t say they are building their own datacenter, though. It is different to say something like, “our website runs in our datacenter” than saying you built a datacenter. You would still say, “at our office buildings”, even if you are only renting a few offices in an office park.

We built an office building would be the analogy.

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#137

Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?

Come to my office and tell me how it’s not actually my office because it’s leased by my company from the investment vehicle for institutional investors that owns the building that stands on land owned by someone else again that was stolen by the British anyway and therefore calling it “my office” makes me a fool and a liar and I should just “say what I mean”.

The british are always the ones to blame :')

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#138

Why would you call colocation "building your own data center"? You could call it "colocation" or "renting space in a data center". What are you building? You're racking. Can you say what you mean?

Come to my office and tell me how it’s not actually my office because it’s leased by my company from the investment vehicle for institutional investors that owns the building that stands on land owned by someone else again that was stolen by the British anyway and therefore calling it “my office” makes me a fool and a liar and I should just “say what I mean”.

It's more like saying you built the building. (I've bootstrapped datacenters to t2)

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come to my office and tell me how it’s not actually my office because it’s leased by my company from the investment vehicle for institutional investors that owns the building that stands on land owned by someone else again that was stolen by the British anyway and therefore calling it “my office” makes me a fool and a liar and I should just “say what I mean”.

The british are always the ones to blame :')

Yes. (except for when it's the Vatican, etc)

Re: So you want to build your own data center

#140
I've spent more time than I care working in data centers and can tell you that your job req is asking for one person to perform 3 different roles, maybe 4. I guarantee you're going to find a "jack of all trades" and a master of none unless you break them out into these jobs.

Application Developer

DevOps Engineer

Site Reliability Engineer

Storage Engineer

Good luck, hope you pay them well.

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