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Your server room

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8 August 2006 - 6:39pm
Submitted by: coolguys

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I was talking to colleagues about the various types of server room we've seen in our careers. The good, the bad and the ugly.

Here's your chance to win some ZENworks swag. Send us a picture of your server room, data center or pile of clutter - and we'll send some swag out to the most entertaining or awe inspiring.

I'll post the best here.

We were also sharing stories.

My personal best story regards a UK customer who had deployed really resilient NetWare 4.11 SFT III pairs. (That was my specialty in 1998!) Very early one Sunday morning ManageWise signaled all kinds of IOEngine errors from one of the pairs. The business was unaffected; file, print and the BTRIEVE application were running perfectly. It just looked like one of the servers of the pair had 'just died'. Onsite security checked out the server room - and discovered it was six feet deep in water. The room was airtight and all that could be seen was water. A four inch water main above the room had ruptured - and all services - except for the NetWare 4.11 SFT III servers - were down.

Do you have a better story? Share yours here - and we'll put everyone in for a drawing for some ZENworks goodies.

Written at: Denver, CO




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eric's picture

Haha - that's funny. Weve

Submitted by eric (not verified) on 9 August 2006 - 8:27am.

Haha - that's funny. Weve got a room of servers. It has cooling and ups and good security.
I will find a photo

Edwin's picture

Don't we all love good

Submitted by Edwin (not verified) on 10 August 2006 - 3:58am.

Don't we all love good stories?

I once had a client who decided to rebuild their server room a few weeks after placing brand new servers and a SAN in there. Of course we sealed of that part with some plastic foil but the builders removed that just before drilling holes in the ceiling since it was cutting of their fresh air... Result, a few milimeters of concrete dust on all servers and disks in the SAN. Still only 3 disks died that week ;)

Bob Mahar's picture

How long do UPS batteries

Submitted by Bob Mahar (not verified) on 10 August 2006 - 7:37pm.

How long do UPS batteries last? In this case exactly 1696 days, 4 hours, 28 minutes, 56 seconds:

http://www.trafficshaper.com/images/Uptime.gif

-- Bob

Todd Seagraves's picture

3 years ago I consolidate 9

Submitted by Todd Seagraves (not verified) on 13 August 2006 - 4:30am.

3 years ago I consolidate 9 stand-alone GroupWise MTA servers into a 3-node cluster. This was our first Netware Cluster, so needless to say I was just happy to get it all configured and running right. Everything was perfect....or so we thought. 6 months, yes... 6 months after it was in production we found out that 2 of the nodes in the cluster were no longer members. Even more, they were not even running and had been shut off about 2 weeks after they were setup. Worse than that 1 node was disconnected, boxed up and shipped back to us and almost repurposed. Luckily when I was getting ready to image the server I let it boot up normally and saw that it was the 2nd node in the cluster. I promptly shipped it back, had it hooked up, and configured the proper settings and monitoring of the systems. No loss, more so a testiment of Novell Cluster Services. We ran 9 MTA's on a single node for six months and never heard one complaint. Clustering is cool!

sysadmin1138's picture

None of my piles were really

Submitted by sysadmin1138 (not verified) on 16 August 2006 - 9:04am.

None of my piles were really entertaining. The best one was before we had a real data-center, but that was the era before digi-cams so I don't have any pictures. Right now our data-center is just about outgrown our UPS. Unfortunately, due to the state of building codes in our area it is vastly cheaper to just add a second one in there than try and expand the current one. Cooling is fine.

This datacenter was planned around servers that took up on average 23 rack-units. And planned for growth. They completely missed the rack-dense trend. As such, I have scads of floor space but my electrical is topping out with only like 15% total 'occupancy'. It did take us 5-6 years to hit the elctrial top. As for cooling we have no real hot-spots in there right now; however, I don't know how hard those Liebert coolers are working.

Mark Schouls's picture

Ok Martin... I know I

Submitted by Mark Schouls (not verified) on 21 August 2006 - 2:50pm.

Ok Martin... I know I probably can't win anything, but I'll let you give me a new phone or Crumpler bag next week in Phoenix.

I used to work for the largest retail organization in Toronto prior to joining Novell. I was part of the operations team that managed the IT infrastructure. We personally managed the IT operations for 3 major call centres in Southern Ontario, with approximately 3000 employees at the locations. One day we got a call from a Call Centre (notice the spelling) Manager and he stated... "Um... just so you know, we've had some complaints that your server room kinda stinks". One of the guys from our team rushed down to the location, opened the door to the server room, and almost immediately passed out from the smell of... well, let's just say... "hot steamers". It turns out, after investigation, that the main washroom's holding tank (strategically located right above our server room) had ruptured, and unloaded all 40 litres of waste directly on top of the racks in the server room. If that wasen't enough, nobody noticed for around 3 or 4 hours, so people continued to flush their little presents into our NetWare lovenest. Long story long... our servers never died... except for a generation 1 Dell PowerEdge running Windows NT 4 and Microsoft SNA Server (we got the Microsoft guy to come back and reinstall).

Long live Drew Major... ;-)

Cheers brother!!

jon giffard's picture

Any chance of a prize for

Submitted by jon giffard (not verified) on 6 September 2006 - 7:16am.

Any chance of a prize for naming the UK customer who had the flood?

Martin Buckley's picture

We both used to work with

Submitted by Martin Buckley (not verified) on 6 September 2006 - 8:09am.

We both used to work with this customer - so probably most professional not to.

Joe Strummer's picture

How about the UK school

Submitted by Joe Strummer (not verified) on 7 October 2006 - 2:48am.

How about the UK school (same era) that had a server failure? On visiting the school and spending and entire day looking for the server, it was concluded they must have been mistaken and had peer to peer. At that point they pointed out a bundle of cables entering a partition wall. They also mentioned the wall was new and done as part of some building work a few years ago.

On making a hole in the wall we saw a Netware 3.11 server that had been tripped in a power outage.

3 years behind a partition wall, just sitting there....

Ron van Herk's picture

I found this one quit nice

Submitted by Ron van Herk (not verified) on 8 October 2006 - 2:33am.

I found this one quit nice :-)

http://www.nnm.ru/imagez/gallery/index/1152886348_...

Dave Colvin's picture

I love working with Novell.

Submitted by Dave Colvin (not verified) on 2 May 2007 - 7:37pm.

I love working with Novell. It just runs, well that is a fib, but once it runs it is rock solid.

I have seen novell servers with uptimes of 500+ days and Solaris boxes with the same but a Windows 2000/2003 box that cracks 100 makes me yell it out around the room.

Cheers,
Dave

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