What I do: Another Day in the Bunker

I thought some might find this interesting. Most who work outside of tech (and many inside tech) never see data centers like this.  To get to our company servers in this hosting facility I have to pass through two man traps and a total of 5 doors with hand scanners.  In addition, each rack of equipment is locked with a unique 6 digit code.  There are hundreds of cameras inside the main datacenter and guards constantly watching from a secure room. Any people or equipment that pass into or out of the facility must be scheduled and itemized and will be inspected prior to being allowed to pass. The weather inside is kept cold and at 50% humidity and the white noise from all the computer and cooling equipment is so loud it’s difficult to have even a yelling conversation more than a few feet apart.  Above you are several layers of infrastructure..  cooling returns, copper and fiber data, AC and DC power feeds of various voltages and tons of cameras and motion sensors… miles and miles of wire.  The tiled floor is raised about 18″ off the real floor and it’s through this space that the cooled air raises through perforated floor tiles along the front of the racks (known as the cold isle).

There were two of us on this trip and our main task was to remove a bunch of older equipment and make room for a new IBM blade cabinet.  We also had to convert all the remaining equipment over from 110 to 220v.  To do this we added two new PDUs for the new 220v 30A circuits and we removed a total of 6 110v PDUs. We were then able to migrate power for most of the servers without taking them down since they have dual power supplies.