Fubra

Installing our new Rackable racks

This blog post what written on Wednesday 6th June 2007 by Paul Maunders who has been working for Fubra as a Director and Co-Founder for 11 years. Our staff are encouraged to blog on this site, but the views expressed are individual and do not necessarily represent those of Fubra.

We sent Mark and Nigel (our server gurus) on another mission yesterday: To install one of our new Rackable racks into the Bunker data centre in Kent.

The Bunker is an ex-cold war nuclear bunker that has been converted into a state of the art co-location facility. It’s also one of the three data centres we currently use along with IXEurope Heathrow, and TeleHouse North.

The actual data centre floor is situated 30 metres below ground level, and so the first challenge was to get rack down there by lowering it on a crane lift. Since the rack was so heavy, they had to remove all 38 dual xeon servers and take them down seperately.

Mark was impressed with the overall ease of assembly of the Rackable rack, saying “Stripping down, rebuilding and cabling a rack of 38 servers would normally take at least a full day, if not more. We managed to get from loading bay to power-up in less than 6 hours, including a complete network rewire of the system, 126 patch cables in total.”

Tags: Bunker, Datacentre, Rackable

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