Small datacenter build-out

[RiDDLeRThC]

We had some great discounts on this deal and did much better than even refurb drive prices on both the SLC and eMLC drives

 

[blinkenflamingo]

List price != real price

I've never understood why EMC can't put their crap in a normal rack.
Or let you choose a rack model you want and they will put it all together for you then ship it to you.
What if your entire datacenter uses APC racks, then you have this non standard junker rack at the end of a row.

EMC does give you the option for customer racking if you want to. Plenty of our customers here use that option. Obviously a Symmetrix is a nogo due to the layout.

But yeah, lets go to IBM and ask whether we can put their mainframes in customer racks instead of those gigantosaurs. A LOT of storage vendors have their own racks due to the internal design.

 

[VisBits]

We had some great discounts on this deal and did much better than even refurb drive prices on both the SLC and eMLC drives

Interesting.. I'm gonna have a chat with my reseller to see if we can get some SSDs for a 5300.

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

Yeah we did a deal at the end of the year with EMC that got us some crazy discounts.

Doubt you would see it on single drive orders though.

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

Well moved all equipment this weekend, went as expected. No major issues. Will be taking some final pictures of everything within the next few days now that all is cleaned up.

Only thing I have on my phone is a 5300 powered down and the 5300 and the 5800 running in its new location. Also looked like I snapped a picture of the AC unit finally working under load. It was a little pissed off prior because the compressor was short cycling due to no heat load in the room.

 

[VisBits]

Sometimes I wish we had some VNX cabs to put our arrays in so they were all pretty and unmatched.. lol.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Those VNX cabinets do look like something from a movie though, imagine a server room filled with these, then add all the random blinking lights, and giant ceiling cooling fans.

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

http://thestorageanarchist.typepad.com/weblog/2011/07/4004-vmax-and-vmaxe-cameo-appearances.html

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

Some final pictures

 

[Red Squirrel]

Cable porn!

Woah, 4x redundant PSUs. Just noticed that. I guess does it use enough power that it needs at least 2 psus to be working? Or is that actually in case 3 fail? Guess you can never be too safe lol.

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

No just dual power supplies.

I use Y-cables to keep things clean and split them between ps0 on each server. We don't have two power feeds but in our colo we do. I cable the same to keep things simple.

 

[artbird309]

What do the network cable colors represent?

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

a and b of each network switch. Orange/purple is frontend, pink/green is backend iscsi

White is firewall uplinks

 

[WesM63]

That's a pretty sweet little data center. We have a decent size vmax. (IIRC, 1-2PB)

 

[calvinj]

a and b of each network switch. Orange/purple is frontend, pink/green is backend iscsi

White is firewall uplinks

got 10 firewall ports?

I see 3750-x on the front side, but what are the other switches for iSCSI, Datacenter traffic? Are those 3850s?

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

Yeah it's the old way they did things here. No vlans were used on the firewalls. So each cable is a network segment.

 

[Red Squirrel]

No just dual power supplies.

I use Y-cables to keep things clean and split them between ps0 on each server. We don't have two power feeds but in our colo we do. I cable the same to keep things simple.

Oh right, silly me, those are all 1U boxes.

 

[calvinj]

Yeah it's the old way they did things here. No vlans were used on the firewalls. So each cable is a network segment.

What do you guys use for your firewalls? What about those switches you have the firewalls plugged into?

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

What do you guys use for your firewalls? What about those switches you have the firewalls plugged into?

Checkpoint firewalls, core switching right now is redundant 4948E's with redundant 10g uplink to two 3750X stacks.

When we outgrow those we will start doing 4948E's as TOR and switch to a 10g CORE.

 

[Shockey]

You can order the gear without the rack...

on a VMAX the way the drive trays are mounted, i dont think a normal rack wouldn't work.

10k model you can. I never seen the 20k/40k in customer racks. Think it due to the UPS on all the drives in those models

 

[RiDDLeRThC]

Fun picture from a little photoshoot that was done around our new office space.