Kris’ datacentre exploits go largly un-noticed as he avoids imploding the internet …
by Kris Sum on Nov.16, 2011, under Our News
So last friday’s datacentre upgrade went well I thought, no cuts or bruises, no data loss… plus I got to the data centre in 4 hours which is pretty good going from down here in the south west!
After signing in, I walked up to the cage where our servers sit. I took a couple of sneaky pictures – i wasn’t sure whether I was allowed to take pictures or not inside the ‘secure area’!
Above: yes people, this is what the internet looks like! Dry air-conditioned floors with raised floors, cable raceways, secure cages and flashing lights.
So the plan was to take out our old 4U VMware server and replace it with two newer, smaller (1U), and much more powerful machines. Then I remembered this server was racked at the top of the cabinet, making it’s removal a very carefully executed operation!
Above: that’s quite high. and that server is v. heavy!
In goes our new gear:
Job done!
Many thanks to the entire Switch Systems team for all their planning and preparation work, making this complete hardware change an operation which only resulted in 90 minutes of downtime (not that I think anyone noticed, as our existing contingency measures meant everything kept running anyway!)