The Fubra Blog
LINX66 Presentation
Today saw day 1 of LINX66, the LINX members meeting at Goodenough College in London. As a LINX member we dispatched our MD Brendan to make a short talk to the group about one of our latest projects — our in-house datacentre.
The presentation briefly covered why we had opted to develop our own infrastructure, how we have gone about implementing all the ancillary services required in a datacentre environment, the network and technology we have built the main services around, how we had gone about detecting and overcoming the inevitable problems which crop up during the day-to-day running of such a facility, and finally the services we are offering at our facility. Brendan then took questions from the floor relating to the final price tag of the project, as well as addressing some of the technical questions relating to our environmental monitoring network.
For more information download the slides which accompanied the presentation (they’re in PowerPoint format).
Celebrity Generator Test #1
Today we had the pleasure of swapping datacentre tours with Sun Microsystems. While we’re not quite on the same scale as Sun we always aim to impress and asked Wayne Horkan, their UK CTO, to perform our weekly generator test.
That means cutting off all mains power to the UPS suite and waiting for the black smoke and roar of our generator kicking in! Yes it worked, and there is nothing like throwing a datacentre kill switch to put a grin on any IT professional’s face…
Installing our new Rackable racks
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.”