Extreme Makeover: Datacenter Edition

Ok, so my recent datacenter upgrade is more akin to “putting lipstick on a pig” than it is “extreme makeover”, but I thought I should blog about it anyway… after all, blogging about server room renovations is all the rage these days, right? Calling it a “datacenter” in the first place is a little misleading, as it is more like “datacloset”, but it’s the best we have right now and is serving our needs just fine. Anyway, when I came on as IT Manager last summer this is what the datacenter looked like…

The open frame rack had been donated by a generous person, but was not suited for the job of holding rack servers. You can’t tell from the picture, but the servers are sticking out past the back rails by about 8 inches, and they are not on rails, but sitting on top of each other.

On the wiring side, like many patch panels it had started out neat but quickly grew into a rat’s nest as adds, moves and changes have occurred over the past four years. Those doors on the vertical Panduit cable management are not just standing open for the heck of it… they were so over-stuffed with cables they couln’t be closed. And check out the portable AC unit we had to stick in there, which was barely able to keep the room under 90f at the peak of summer. As you can see, the room was in dire need of some serious TLC.

Enter the new APC NetShelter rack:

Ahhhh, ain’t she pretty? I picked the APC rack because it had the features I needed like lockable front and back doors, and plenty of power options. The sides are also removable, and it is universally compatible with all major makes of servers.

Over the course of one evening myself and a buddy did the physical server changeover, while another buddy reconfigured the switches into a new network architecture. You see, buried beneath all of those cables were four Cisco switches and a router… and because of the way the network had grown over the years, they were not configured anywhere near optimally, so we redid it all from scratch.

We moved layer 3 chores from the 2800 router to the 3560G “core” switch, and instead of leaving each switch daisy-chaining from one to the other we starred them all off of the core switch. In addition to that, we pulled firewall/VPN chores off of the 2800 and moved those to an Astaro 220 appliance, and relegated the 2800 to handling only our Cisco Unity Express voice mail system.

Along with the upgrades we also had a dedicated 5 ton AC unit installed into the room. There was just enough space between ceiling tiles and deck to shoehorn in the air handler. The servers should be a lot happier with the ambient temp this summer

Here is the finished product. It might not look like much of an improvement, but believe me, it is! The network is far more stable, far better performing, and you can actually see the gear.

Finally, take a piece of wood and paint it black, add a spare piece of cable management and voila, instant cable bridge! In the prior setup most of the cables between server rack and patch panels were on the floor or simply strung between the two units.