Comment by toddmorey
8 hours ago
Reminds me of the old Rackspace days! Boy we had some war stories:
- Some EMC guys came to install a storage device for us to test... and tripped over each other and knocked out an entire Rack of servers like a comedy skit. (They uh... didn't win the contract.)
- Some poor guy driving a truck had a heart attack and the crash took our DFW datecenter offline. (There were ballards to prevent this sort of scenario, but the cement hadn't been poured in them yet.)
- At one point we temporarily laser-beamed bandwidth across the street to another building
- There was one day we knocked out windows and purchased box fans because servers were literally catching on fire.
Data center science has... well improved since the earlier days. We worked with Facebook on the OpenCompute Project that had some very forward looking infra concepts at the time.
We had a bird land on a transformer up on a pole and blew fuses. A couple years later, I toured the facility and the fried carcass was still there on the ground below it.
Left as a warning to other birds, no doubt.
> There was one day we knocked out windows and purchased box fans because servers were literally catching on fire.
Pointing the fans in or out?
You want to point them in.
The datacenters I've been in with emergency cooling fans in the walls all exhaust out, not in. Easier to get portable CRACs inside and get a good draft going.
> Data center science has... well improved since the earlier days
You say that, but...
> There was one day we knocked out windows and purchased box fans because servers were literally catching on fire
This happened to Equinix's CH1 datacenter in Chicago Jan24 (not the literal fire part). Took down Azure ExpressRoute.
Apparently it got too cold and the CRACs couldn't take it? I'm told they had all the doors and windows open trying to keep things cold enough, but alas. As the CRAC goes, so goes the servers
> and purchased box fans because servers were literally catching on fire
Ah yes, or a collection of R2D2 portable air conditioners, with the tails draped out through the window.
Or a coolant leak that no one noticed until the sub-floor was completely full and the floor panels started to float!
When it comes to Internet service we're living in the early 2000s in the some parts of the manufacturing world
I recall getting a DC tour of LON3 and being totally blown away by it all as a 20-something web dev. Good times.