On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 12:29:00PM -0500, William Donzelli wrote: I wonder why, perhaps afraid to atract burglars? - Pontus.

Common knowledge. You know how much heat the computers generate and how much power they eat, etc.

On 1/12/11 1:35 PM, William Donzelli wrote: Actually it is once you've done it once or twice. The vast majority of it is common sense and logic. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to justify a fat bill. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 12/01/2011 20:46, Dave McGuire wrote: And security, access control, network connectivity and layout, cooling types, hot/cold aisles, UPS provision, building and energy monitoring/management systems, server monitoring, KVMs/console servers, space allocation. Yes, quite a lot is common sense but there's a lot to consider and plan, and some of it needs expert input if only for reasons of compliance. (I know, we built two new ones in the last two years). As for knowing how much heat is generated and power consumed, reality bears no resemblance to manufacturers' data. Sadly, that matters a lot (because of costs of power infrastructure and cooling provision) when dealing with budget holders and accountants. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

Throw in load balancing, off-site fail over mirror sites, incage and separate offsite backup storage... Geeez, I just bought a 2TB drive the other day for $79 ! We had EMC come in to do an install for FortuneCity and it was a 1.5TB storage system, it was 4 cabinets - one was the controller cabinet (which was cool, it had a built in laptop that folded out from the door and three storage cabs, they were all 72" tall cabinets filled to the brim with drives and then next to it all was a dedicated Sun E450 pedestal unit for managing the whole thing. 220v 3phase 30amp on the controller, pair of 30amp's on each of the storage cab's... That was in early 2000... man talk about cheap storage today! While guidelines are not a fixed cookie cutter fits-all today, the site spec's still needed to meet the manufacture requirements, the controller was 980lbs, the storage cabs were 1,200lbs each so we had to make sure facilities gave the go ahead on the weight load. Power consumption was calc'd and then the manufacture heat dissapation had to be met, the line of cabs were actually set away from the server racks (about a good 6-7' as I recall) and then they were 3' from the cage fencing wall so that if the datacenter build out ever changed (it was an open walkway at the time) and a cage was added adjacent, the circulation was be unobstructed. The datacenter was always at 62 degree's, after working 4-5 hours in there, your knuckles started to stiffen up and you'd feel the cold from the floor come up into your shins... ah.... good times, good times :-) I loved the quietness, all you heard was the sounds of fans whirling away, it was a deafening kind of quiet background noise, I miss that. Curt William Donzelli wrote:

On 12 Jan 2011 at 22:28, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: The previous generation had lots of 7 and 9 track tape drives. The vacuum pumps in those were anything but quiet, particularly if you had 16 or 24 or more of the damned things. It was like a very loud white noise (maybe 80 dB or so); you had to raise your voice above a normal conversational level to be heard. Over an 8 hour session, you felt that your nerves had been scrubbed raw. Oddly enough, the CPU was quiet--it used water for the heat exchanger; no air. Printers and card readers could get to be loud, but they weren't going all the time and the printers had acoustic hoods. --Chuck

On 13 Jan 2011 at 11:17, Bob Brown wrote: Yes, I remember the angry snarl when the punch started up, which was rare, as the darned thing got pretty warm and after about 1000 cards would start throwing verify faults. So it wasn't used a lot, thankfully. Punching was done row-wise, as opposed to the reader which was column-wise. --Chuck

On Wednesday, January 12, 2011, William Donzelli wrote: Now, that's thinking "out of the box." :) In a similar vein, Purdue couldn't get rid of all of their CDC 6500 (I think) because its Extended Memory cabinet was too big to get it in the existing elevators. To get it into the basement, they had dug a pit, which now was sealed up. They finally got it out after building an extension on the building, designed for the new Cyber 205 they were getting, and putting in a new elevator that was just barely big enough (they couldn't fit a person in the elevator at the same time as the cabinet). Pat -- Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

With big data centers, often there is just way too much at stake. Look at the damage that occurred when AOL had that very long blackout. I think it is a "trade skill", mostly driven by the telephone and mainframe guys. There is still a huge Bell System and IBM influence in the design of data centers. It is too bad a lot of younger Unix and Windows based companies often ignore this knowledge, and it gets them into trouble, or at best, gives them inefficiencies they never realize. Do modern companies (Dell, Compaq, Cisco, Sun, etc.) even still publish the big old installation planning guides like IBM did (and still does)? The ones I have seen look like afterthoughs written on the back of a gum wrapper. -- Will

--- On Wed, 1/12/11, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote: I've never seen any such manual, but I've seen plenty of data center designs like that. One customer's site had several 1 and 2U servers, all jammed into a two-post comms rack, all stacked on top of the one piece of hardware that actually mounted into the rack, the router. It's amazing that the rack didn't fall over. Their other servers were tower cabinets sitting on the floor. -Ian

Well it is true - while working at Exodus Communications/Cable & Wireless back in 1999-2002 camera's were absolutely forbidden. At one point GE needed to see the physical setup of their cages for GE.com and GE Corporate Mail.... we had to have their lawyers and Exodus' lawyers, I had to be given permission to bring a camera into the datacenter, escorted by the security guards, took the photo's - the head of security needed to view the images to make sure no other cage contents from adjacent cages were in the photo and then they were given to the GE lawyers, it was a big deal indeed... Now I know from some old issues of Compuserve Magazine I have someplace (not sure where they are right now) there were some fishbowl taken photo's for a dramatic effect and I've seen one or two other photo's of Compuserve data facilities, but no video. I've seen some photo's that people took in the 80's of the outside of the Compuserve corp headquarters, which appeared to be a massive campus. I'm just hoping that somewhere a documentary film or internal promo film may have been shot and we could see what Compuserve was like. When you think about what they accomplished pre-internet, it was a very ambitious and monumental undertaking and it would great to see if some historical material exists on such a key and important part of the on-line age. Curt Al Kossow wrote:

On Wed, 12 Jan 2011, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] A fan of greengrocer's apostrophes ;-)) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Commission:_greengrocers.27_apostro…] Christian

On 1/12/11 12:58 PM, Rich Alderson wrote: Actually, I was thinking more about the software side than physical plant. What got me thinking about this were several generations of network based services, things like General Magic, Web TV, Danger, etc. that had big back-end infrastructures, and the huge number of web based services that exist now. Besides being a total nightmare for any attempts for software preservation, I assume that they all came up with differing configuration, backup, and software rollout strategies. The people I have talked to who worked on these systems said that they all learned the stuff on the job, then used what they learned when they built the next system. Rinse, lather, repeat.

QuantumLink, to the best of my knowledge, was always Stratus. During the waning days AOL kept the old Stratus on for QLink subscribers until they came up with the Y2K excuse and powered it down. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Faith is to be sure of what you hope for. -- The Kry, "Take My Hand" -------

There were probably multiple during the heyday, but I definitely know there was just one at the end. It wasn't connected to anything else and simply sat in its own private hell, essentially. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx -------------