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- xptical, on 10/12/2007, -3/+45#2 Server rails
Every rail kit we have allows servers to slide out one at a time. They even have a scissors thingy to keep cables from binding. We actually have 2 scissors per server: power from the left and data from the right. The Dell servers they show are almost what we use.
#3 Maintenance loops.
That's a bit excessive, but guys who term fiber (especially MTRJ) are not cheap. And having a bit of slack has saved me more often than not. If you label every cable at both ends with FROM and TO identifier rs, you'll save a lot of headaches.
#3 Bad rack mounts
Don't buy cheap servers. If you can, get fore and aft rails and double mount. Never had a problem with this.
#4 Bad power placement
Get an electrician to install an individual strip in every rack. Then, run them to a properly labeled power panel.
#5 KVM issues.
The rack mount KVMs are a ripoff. We run a simple KVM with the outlets on the front of the rack. We keep a Keyboard, mouse, and monitor on a roll-around cart for critical maintenance. VNC takes care of regular stuff.
#7 & 8 Dust
You should have a schedule where a lackey goes around with a vacuum cleaner.
#9 Stupid contractors
In the contract, define that you want them to use drop cloths. This is most likely some guy's cousin doing the work.
#10 See #3
#11 See #3
Yes, John, labelling includes all the power cords. At both ends!
#12 Mystery device
Labelling can help. Sometimes, it just isn't possible to get a proper rack mount part for simple ***** like 4-port switches.
#13 Cable hell
Labelling is the answer here. Also, look at some tech docs on how to run a cable. Long cables go behind short cables. Don't do it wrong just because the 20 guys before you did it wrong. In 99% of the cases, you can actually disconnect and fix bad cabling before the hell-desk even finishes telling the user to reboot.
#14 Fire suppression
Okay, this is a sticky issue. A good chemical/gas system costs a lot. A *lot*. Our small comms closets are protected by gas. Think an area the size of your bathroom. Maybe 10' sq. These cost $10k. In a large datacenter, using water is cheap. Our main datacenter has the computers connected to a single breaker panel. If the fire alarm sounds, the last guy out hits the "killswitch" and that drops all the power. After a day to dry, most would reboot no problem. If the last guy out dies before he gets a chance, then you've got bigger problems than reactivating servers. We keep a beefy server in an alternate location with about 10 copies of Win2k server running under VMWare. We also store our off-site backups here. If the worst happens, we can get e-mail (minus user data; it's too big for a single server), DNS, PDC, Proxy, Firewall, internal WWW, external WWW, and company core data back online within 2 hours. That would happen while the rest of the IT team was at the morgue either identifying bodies, or being identified.
The biggest hint I can offer? Do not ever do something and then think you'll go back later to fix it. You wont. And the guy who replaces you will take pics like these and make fun of you all over WWW-land. - toveling, on 10/12/2007, -2/+40Horribly un-funny captions.
Server room wasn't THAT bad either. Bad, but there's much worse out there. - mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -1/+32The writer isn't remotely as funny as he thinks he is, it's written at a grade-school level, and those ad-whoring next > next > next> next articles are incredibly irritating.
- jkrebs1, on 10/12/2007, -3/+28terribly written article. the author is trying way too hard to be funny.
- johntravolta, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24I agree. This made it to the front page just because of the topic. This is very poorly done.
- mechmike0034, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20I do volunteer IT support for a local Humane Society, in a building they've long since overgrown. Ever step in dog crap while rebooting a server?
- ksgant, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Worked at a place where someone mistook the emergency power shutdown button on the wall (this was an old system with big washing-machine disk pak drives) to shut down the power because one of the drives was smoking...instead he hit the halon dump.
Yeah, it was pretty spectacular seeing all these guys running over each other to get out of the system room while the inside looked like a tornado going off. - Agret, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15I agree, real server admins would have much more cable clutter and much worse pictures to take. That guy has no idea what he's doing with his server setup.
- Bdog2g2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Reminds me of a company I worked for that had 2 server racks right below an A/C w/ a water trap. Well the trapped rusted through and lets just say servers aren' ast water proof as one would like.
- SpacemanSpiff, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13Your local Humane Society has a server room? WTF
- datastorageguy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12Looking at #6 real quick, I thought it was a bathroom in a data center.
I really don't see the problem with the fiber cable "lasso" one, though. That fiber cable is extremely delicate and can be destroyed if just handled wrong. The best thing to do is have it spliced to the correct length rather than have to loop it. If this can't be done, making it into a loop to make it orderly is probably a good idea. - IHaveIssues, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12Mental note: skip reading online articles at Tech Republic, too little text per page.
- moisie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Upon reading the title my mind instantly went to things like; don't ***** on the carpet etc. I suppose that's just good practise in general though.
- mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11I wish I could bury your comment twice.
- mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10That article writer needs to be euthanized.
- X111, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Rather lame and farfetched imho. I've seen way more messd up pics floating around. This doesn't look half bad.
- acidzebra, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7pretty lame article all in all.
- Seta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I work at a college, and have been to the equipment room in a few of the buildings. I find it extremely interesting however that one of the buildings has it's machine rack directly under a number of exposed pipes (at least 5 or so), and in the culinery building no less (the number of plumbing problems and grease trap overflows they cause boggles the mind), and would you imagine what I came into work one day to see? A burst pipe over the equipment rack. Directly over it. Dumping gallons of water onto the switches, UPS and other equipment. Ended up as one of those things you just had to laugh at because of how absurd it was while you run to get the security and maintainence guys (since you'll get hell if you turn off the power/water by yourself, or even dare to unplug something).
- easyfrag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7While at first glance sprinklers in a server room seems ridiculous it is probably code in some places, the goal after all is to save the lives of people in the rest of the building irregardless of any loss of equipment. Sprinklers are triggered by heat, if it gets hot enough in the server room to set off a sprinkler then your servers are already ruined.
- mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Not only aren't they interesting, but they're also
- hansamurai, on 10/12/2007, -1/+714 pages? Why not just ask me for my email address and send me spam if I wanted to look at that many ads?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Similar occurence at my company...
Over the weekend, they decided to completely turn off the air conditioning in the entire building. Apparently as a result of bad circulation (baffles me too) the server room's temperature got too low and the alarm started going off. Well, security went into the room to try to kill the alarm until they could get ahold of an IT staff member and they decided to hit the emergency power off button (which was guarded by a nice plastic shield and the apparently cryptic words "EMERGENCY POWER DOWN").
Everyone was very happy. - Shivetya, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6We had pictures sent to us from one of our centers showing of the new look of their computer room. Right down to the potted plants, and a hanging basket plant (this is LA). The problem we had was that the plants were on top of the servers.
In another location they had a leak in the roof so they had drapped plastic sheets in the computer room to direct any possible water from the machines to the floor, which was raised, which had all the power connections.... oh well. - yarsrevenge, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6The so-called bad "cable lasso" is actually the PROPER THING to do when terminating a long-haul run of high-quality (wave division multiplex) optical fiber.
Optical cables, especially the ultra-high-bandwidth/low-loss types, have a minimum bending radius which you DO NOT want to ever come close to. Unlike electrical cabling, no magnetic impedance fields are created when doing dense loops since the signal is composed of light.
Additionally, contracting optical cable and splicing optical cabling is about 12x more expensive so you want to have plenty of slack at all termination points to make retrofitting, re-runs, and repairs that much less labor intensive.
The guy who wrote this knows jack squat about data centers and signaling. This story deserves to be buried--big time. - spacebar14, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Don't say "I agree".
Use the thumbs up button, thats what its for. - Raithmir, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7There's something wrong with those photo's?
I really should get a few photo's of ours! - d3c0y, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Not bad... I have seen MUCH worse...this morning at work!
- johntravolta, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Nothing like taking a ***** on a 27" CRT to wake you up in the morning. Who's up for the howto on turning one of these puppies into a toilet?
- nife, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Good advice even though some of those aren't that big a deal.
I've worked in a couple server rooms and I don't really mind using one monitor for a rack if its on a cart.
And the cable lassos are needed in someplaces. - DJDrastic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Eh some of those were rather tame , the spaghetti cable at least looks like there was some sort of cable coloring being used .I've had rainbow sites , where cables into the patch panels would form a rainbow if properly aligned :)
- Pokelicious, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Must be a slow news day. Those photos aren't very interesting or
- CovardeAnonimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4mark1372, don't worry, i buried him for you.
- mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5At least SOMEONE is rolling on the floor laughing at the article, then.
- mcdevcom, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6I thought *this* was what not to do in a server room: http://scottmcdaniel.org/w/archives/8
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Whoever wrote this article thinks he is the funniest man alive.
I can just feel the elitism radiating off my screen as I read it. - Madcowz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Pile of rubbish.
Bad photographs and awful 'written by a 6 year old' text - GooBoy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Granted some of these are not best practice, some are a flat out bad idea, but it looked like a case of IT having to make do with what they had.
I guess they were unlike the vast majority of organisations with unlimited funding to redo the server room every time a server room "rule" is about to be broken. - robnar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4The article's author was talking about rack mounting a server and then stacking other servers on top of it rather than rack mounting all of them.
- violentvinyl, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Great points. Got a few to add though.
#3 & #12 Two (three?) words: Rack-mount shelves.
#4 If its an option when you have your power installed, make sure the outlets are twist lock. Those suckers aren't going anywhere.
#5 A good IP KVM is worth its wait in gold. Being able to access POST and BIOS remotely is a feature that you won't know how you lived without once you have it. - soupy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yeah, this server room is not bad at all. And the guy is not funny.
I have seen "server rooms" that were a 3' x 3' closet, and when you opened the door, cables would come spilling out all over the place. - mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -9/+11And a lesson in the rules of pluralization while you're at it.
- Bradl3y, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Don't moderate by replying to comments, use the thumbs down button, that is what it is for.
Oh damn, now everyone has to give 3 comments a thumbs down to only show relavent information - dbuttry, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5I could recreate every one of these pictures at my company! lol! In fact, I could add several that are much worse! Hopefully over the next year or two I should be able to post some good before/after pictures!
- zorikin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If you are using rails, you are not "stacking" them.
- DinkBot007, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yeah, I thought it would be funny. Maybe I should share my experience in the server room with....let's just call her jill, whose racks I handled ;)
Lame attempt? Yes, but a sorta true story. - wilf_brim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I thought the same thing when I saw that. Likewise, getting every cable run neat and tidy (either in your server room, or behind your media center in the living room) takes work, and it looks wonderful. Until you have to replace a component, or change your configuration.
Then you have to cut into all those cable ties, and generally make a huge mess. Even though it is ugly, leaving slack and room for repair/replacement/reconfiguration in cable runs is the correct thing to do. - BuddhaChu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1At least the photos show the patch panel actually being used. When I got to one of the places I worked in the past, more than half the LAN drops went straight out of the wall into the switch bypassing the brand new patch panel that went largely unused. Talk about a fkn mess...
- chaynes68, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2One place I worked at decided to save a buck and build their own "internal" data center. When it opened they took everyone thru for a tour. The director was bragging about the backup power generator, fire doors, redundant T3's etc. The receptionist looked up at the ceiling and asked what would happen if the (water based) sprinklers went off. The director got all red faced and sort of blew off the question. The next day there was a pile of blue tarps in the corner. The NOC was sent a memo that in the case of sprinklers going off they were to cover the racks with blue tarps (not run out of the building yelling FIRE!). Needless to say the director of that project no longer has a job.
- Scott2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There are some stupid things here, but not all that bad.
Want to see bad? Walk into the server room at any CompUSA. Its enough to make any IT guy cry. - Fentekreel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1not bad imo though i must say he missed a few that we found out... like having office parties in or near the racks....and smoking....though those few adventerous soome how found enough room within all those wires to uh how can i say ... be that bump you hear in the nigh a few times.....i never thought there was enough room in there ..... sux when you get caught up in the cabeling and what not... ...
;) -
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