Look what I walked into....

J

jtr8178

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2008
Messages
266
Well, I got this new position and I thought I would post some pics of the sever room. Keep in mind that EVERYTHING for company goes through this. We have 6 physical locations spread out over an entire state, and do over $150 million a year in revenue. As you can see, I have some work ahead of me! :eek:

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas, I'm completly open to them!

photo%2001.JPG


photo%2003.JPG


photo%2002.JPG


photo%2005.JPG


photo%2004.JPG


photo%2006.JPG


photo%2008.JPG


photo%2007.JPG


photo%2009.JPG


photo%2010.JPG


photo%2012.JPG


photo%2011.JPG
 
I hear they are coming out with a new Invisible Cat6 cable, may help you out
 
I've seen worse. At least you have newer(ish) routers.
I cleaned one of our MDF's a few months ago and found a box that had been sitting under a minisplit HVAC for several years and was all wet and decomposing. I found a brand new (still sealed in shrink wrap) copy of Windows NT4.
 
I've also seen a lot worse. From the looks of it you have quite a few abandoned amphenol cables (25 pair phone) take them out and head to the scrap yard :)
 
If you clean that up really well, use the before and after pictures to negotiate a raise. =]
 
I have pictures of a network closet at morgan stanley smith barney in new york that would blow your mind. took them while installing the voice recording server their traders use. You'd think a place like that would have better IT
 
Here are my other issues with the server room:

1) The white roll-around server cart is some odd size. The back door won't close because the server is too large.
2) The back-up power supply situation is horrible. I walked into work on Monday morning to find we had no phones or Internet -- COMPANY WIDE. The culprit was a cheap triplite power supply failed, and this was the only back-up for our CRITICAL networking components. Not good.
3) The rats nest of CAT5 cable
4) The obsolete equipment still attached to the walls
5) The middle rack doesn't have the servers properly attached. They are just sitting on each other... So if I had to make repairs on the bottom 2, I'd have to turn off the ones above it, remove, etc...
6) Half of the systems have no back-up software, or they have it but it isn't functional
7) Our routers are somewhat new, but I found out today that we RENT them. Yes, we've been paying a monthly rental fee for over 10 years. They give us new routers every couple.
8) Our Cisco CallManager VOIP system is end-of-support next month. Apparently they told us in November, but no one told me until 4 weeks ago.
9) I do not have admin access to the following: PIX Firewall, any routers, WebSense Security, TrendMicro, our internal business system server, or Cisco CallManager. We outsource all of it -- To one company who is basically raping us blind.
10) Several of the UPS's that we do have are either at Max Load or are nearing the end of their useful life. Nothing is setup for remote monitoring either.

I am putting together a quote for a new rack, with slide out keyboards, LCDs, UPS's, etc... Try to do this thing right and get some control over this.
 
I agree that it could be much worse ... But it is really embarrasing when I've had to show a couple vendors the room for this Cisco CallManager upgrade I'm working on. One step at a time...

Oh yea, and for everyone that says it isn't that bad: I invite you to come down to SC and spend a weekend helping me clean it up. ;)
 
The vendors you speak of probably have some old war stories that make that room look like the bridge of the enterprise.

At least you get to buy new equipment and make the room nice. I love doing that stuff. Probably a mild form of OCD, but it keeps me out of trouble!
 
you need to shut everything down .. take it out of that room .. and repaint first ..then fix some of the ceiling tiles! .. get your priorities right man! :p
 
Looks pretty bad, I can't wait till I'm finished cleaning up our server room. It was a MESS when I first started. We had power cables from rack 1 stretched all the way to rack 6. On top of that we had about 10 different network switches just sitting on servers throughout the racks for different segments.
 
I hope you document your experience on this thread. Would be great see your work from day one to day.. well when you're done. So, did you get to see the server room before you were hired? Did someone jump ship or get fired that left them with this situation?
 
I've seen worse, but also seen much better. Hopefully you can get a virtualization program going, buy a new rack (that one has threaded holes.. ewww) and get a small SAN, and a couple of ESX hosts. P2V all that old shit. throw up some ladder rack, fix you cableing up a bit, and install a decent UPS.
 
It always amazes me that every time a T1 gets put in a building they drop a new line instead of using the existing one even though 99 times out of 100 it is the same provider coming into the building.
 
Looks like some 2800 Series routers, maybe a couple of 2600s, a 2950-24 maybe...

GOOD HOLY SHIT.....WHAT TYPE OF MONITORS ARE THOSE!?! Those two beasts are probably taking up half your power consumption right there.

I like the fact too that some routers face one way, some face the other. About as classy as the paint peeling from the cinder blocks behind the rack....hahaha.
 
C7J0yc3 said:
It always amazes me that every time a T1 gets put in a building they drop a new line instead of using the existing one even though 99 times out of 100 it is the same provider coming into the building.
Click to expand...

Yeah I never understood this. we have two shelves of T1 cards, one shelf isn't even powered on.
 
adam30k said:
So, did you get to see the server room before you were hired? Did someone jump ship or get fired that left them with this situation?
Click to expand...

I'm curious of this too. It sounds though that there was no IT department, and you had others/consultants/sales people come over and slowly start to plug stuff in. Pretty amazing about the renting devices for a decade though, wow!
 
Boy, I would trace/map the crap out of that mess before I touched a damn thing. Then I'd go nuts. :D
 
You need new racks with cable management on either side of them. Otherwise maybe get some velcro straps. I hate zip ties.
 
Looks like there is some water damage on at least one of the ceiling tiles. I'd look into that before anything else.
 
That's about an afternoon worth of work to make it perfect.

I spend at least 4 full 16-hour-day weekends a year trying to tidy up our room and it's still about 500x worse than that.

Just remember it's a server room, not your kitchen or living room.
 
lol noticed that now.

I don't get how any company can even think about running water lines where IT equipment goes.

I laugh everytime I go in our PBX room. It has a sprinkler system, and they put a plastic shield over the PBX. Yeah like that's going to do anything when you have 500PSI of water spraying everywhere.
 
Wow... just blows my mind that companies that do less than half a mil in sales are just as cheap as ones that do millions and millions in sales. WTF???

I must say, though... I, personally, never had to deal with anything as bad as that... I guess some of you guys have seen worse? :eek: I consider myself now a lucky geek :p
 
RavinDJ said:
Wow... just blows my mind that companies that do less than half a mil in sales are just as cheap as ones that do millions and millions in sales. WTF???

I must say, though... I, personally, never had to deal with anything as bad as that... I guess some of you guys have seen worse? :eek: I consider myself now a lucky geek :p
Click to expand...

It just depends who is the IT person. I have met some IT people (myself included) that just have OCD and take the time to make things need and then you have others that just don't give a shit and want things to work.
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
It just depends who is the IT person. I have met some IT people (myself included) that just have OCD and take the time to make things need and then you have others that just don't give a shit and want things to work.
Click to expand...
Don't want to jump on you, but if you're dedicating enough of your job for everything to be spic and span 100% of the time, you better be getting paid like a janitor too or the owner of the company is getting ripped off :D
 
Yeah that ceiling tile looks like it's ready to drop at any minute.

It's easy to get lazy running cables and if you let it go it will be a mess quickly. Another problem is if you have more than one person running cables. There will always be someone that doesn't give a shit and make it a mess in no time.
 
ugh, the server/network closet i inherited was similar... moving to a bigger room that wasn't a furnace was a start for me.. Looks like a weekend of downtime to replace and rerack and clean up cables... heck, just find a new server room and vacate this to be a maintenance room... It doesn't even look like it has proper AC w/the water stained bent tiles... Yeah, new equipment, P2V everything into a rack or two and spend a weekend or two gutting the old stuff...

I recognize that Nortel phone from my old job... although I swear it only came in a dark black/brown color...
 
Innocence said:
Don't want to jump on you, but if you're dedicating enough of your job for everything to be spic and span 100% of the time, you better be getting paid like a janitor too or the owner of the company is getting ripped off :D
Click to expand...

Sadly that's kinda true. too much pressure tends to be put on It to have everything doen yesterday, that often you just don't have time to do it right, and the customer could not give a rat's ass how bad it looks, as long as the job can be completed in 0.5 seconds instead of 15 minutes. It's sad, really.
 
ThreeDee said:
you need to shut everything down .. take it out of that room .. and repaint first ..then fix some of the ceiling tiles! .. get your priorities right man! :p
Click to expand...

Trust me, I am pretty anal about things like this, and a big part of me wants to do that.

However, an even larger part of me realizes that I'd have to do it on a weekend, it would take 2 days, and at the end of the day no one would care except me. :)
 
adam30k said:
I hope you document your experience on this thread. Would be great see your work from day one to day.. well when you're done. So, did you get to see the server room before you were hired? Did someone jump ship or get fired that left them with this situation?
Click to expand...

I've actually worked for this company for 5 yeas, just not in IT. Its a long story, but basically the IT Manager retired. We actually joked that he retired 5 years ago, as he hasn't done much since then. He didn't make any of the IT decisions (accounting did, for all the sense that makes), and we have basically outsourced EVERYTHING. He was purchasing the longest warranties on everything, and just outsourced pretty much his whole job. He left me with a nicelist of 1-800's to call for tech support tho.

I knew it wasn't a good situation, but hey, at least everything is operational. It is just a matter of figuring it all out now. I spent a good part of my day researching racks, UPS's, rack equipment, cable management, etc... I'm taking the road that someone else suggested -- Buy a new rack, consolidate, and clean up the junk.
 
corge said:
Looks like some 2800 Series routers, maybe a couple of 2600s, a 2950-24 maybe...

GOOD HOLY SHIT.....WHAT TYPE OF MONITORS ARE THOSE!?! Those two beasts are probably taking up half your power consumption right there.

I like the fact too that some routers face one way, some face the other. About as classy as the paint peeling from the cinder blocks behind the rack....hahaha.
Click to expand...

Yea, and I didn't include the pictures of piles of old CRT monitors, old routers, external modems, and a bunch of other equipment that went obsolete 10 years ago. I'm still not quite sure why we were hanging on to that stuff...

I plan to upgrade the CRT monitors to a 1U 17" LCD slide out with keyboard/mouse, plus KVM for the multitude of old servers that are still functioning (for now).
 
FrostBite said:
I'm curious of this too. It sounds though that there was no IT department, and you had others/consultants/sales people come over and slowly start to plug stuff in. Pretty amazing about the renting devices for a decade though, wow!
Click to expand...

Kind of like renting your car for 10 years, huh?

Here was the response they (Accounting & the old IT person): "Its a great deal. If something breaks they send a new one!"

Umm... We probably could have purchased the router 10x over with our monthly payment. I just kept my mouth shut, smiled, and nodded.
 
I'm kind of hurt considering I'm an accountant... :(

Which makes me curious of something. Are you going to try to convince them to give up these shananigins and just buy the equipment? Are you looking to virtualize as much as you can? It's not cheap but the ROI would be pretty amazing when upgrading from all of that. What, 8 months of renting all of that should cover a pair of beefy servers, plenty of extra RAM, and some licenses, no?
 
jtr8178 said:
Kind of like renting your car for 10 years, huh?

Here was the response they (Accounting & the old IT person): "Its a great deal. If something breaks they send a new one!"

Umm... We probably could have purchased the router 10x over with our monthly payment. I just kept my mouth shut, smiled, and nodded.
Click to expand...

This is an example of how companies will spend more money so they can save money. That logic always makes me laugh. :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top