datacenter re-rack and re-cable project +SAN installation

[Pete]

as most everyone knows, I manage a small datacenter.  We currently have 3 racks of servers and a couple internet connections, not much, but enough to keep me busy all the time.

When I started here, the place was a disaster.  The datacenter doors were left wide open 24/7 due to no air conditioning, there were cables hanging out of the ceiling everywhere, junk all over the floor, running systems setup all over the place, patch cables everywhere, most UPS units had failed batteries and were beeping all the time etc.  In fact, it was so bad you couldn't even walk much further than to the front of the racks to reset a server.  Nobody knew what was patched into what, in fact, I found patches still patched into our switches that weren't even dropped into our office any more, they were in someone elses office!

It took me about 3 months to get all the junk cleaned out, 5 ton AC unit installed on the roof, switches installed and configured correctly, the cables cleaned up and put where they should be, UPS' wired correctly, and god knows what else I've forgotten since then. Danny, Heather, Erik etc saw the place in this state.  Not bad, but not up to my standards.  The racks were old and wobbly, all the servers were cabled up through the tops of the rack to switches in a 2 post network rack, and all of them had super long power cables bundled up all over the floor and plugged into god knows where.

As part of our last budget of equipment purchasing, I budgeted for 2 new Dell racks with APC full height PDUs, and a Promise VTrak fiber channel SAN (thanks again for the help with that Nate!)

I began the slow process of moving servers over to the new racks while maintaining uptime...which meant a lot of early hours and weekend hours.  The SAN is currently online and operational, it will be used to house lots of VMWare vms, SQL databases, and file storage.  Sunday I finished the re-rack project with a 3 hour service window to move the rest of the servers that I wasn't previously able to.

Before:

[Pete]

After:

[Jeremy]

Good stuff.

[DannyBoy]

Some nice work there.  We recently bought a new Dell rack and about 30tb of storage and all other kinds of goodies for our new NAS setup.  Probably won't be until end of summer before it's all up and running.