Comment by JKCalhoun
1 day ago
"I remember having to move our systems to make sure we were in a data centre as close as possible to them and Google/Yahoo…"
Hurricane Electric comes to mind. A friend rents rack space there and I tagged along a few times when he was installing a new server, etc. Wild place. A bit of security to even get in. In one of the huge rooms where his rented rack is, 5 meters or so of racks with the same noisy hardware—"Might be Pinterest", my friend suggested.
Other racks literally enclosed within a welded wire cage…
My company's cage was the unfortunate neighbor of Google's cage at Exodus SC3 in Santa Clara. Even then, Google's compute density was much higher than industry standards. They didn't rack-mount their servers; they basically extracted every part that wound be in a case (motherboard, PSU, disks, heat sinks, etc.) and laid it on a cork board shelf. They then placed the boards two units deep, so if you needed to service the unit in back, you'd have to remove the unit in front first. These were all wired like spaghetti to an HP switch sitting on top of the cabinet. It looked like a meth head's house. Here's a photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers#/media/Fil...
Anyway, the heat emanating from their space was absolutely insane. Our servers would have random thermal shutdowns because their excess heat was penetrating our space, and this impacted our overall ability both to serve and to get some sleep as we were paged 24x7.
This was before modern cold/hot aisle DC designs, so the only thing that could be done was for the colo facility to add more air conditioning. They set up some spot coolers that helped, but we moved to a different facility about as fast we could.
I ended up with a host called GoGrid since they were able to offer a mix of dedicated servers and cloud for when we needed to burst and they had space in 365 Main Street SF. I went to visit their team while in town and they took me for a tour of the data centre and it was very much like that with them pointing to random racks as being owned by X, Y, and Z. It feels embarrassing to say but I was a bit star struck by the servers.
I worked at GoGrid and this is one of the first times I’ve heard someone mention it who wasn’t an employee.
And yeah, the data center was fun to visit.