Server room chuckles

[andygates]

Our air-con failed again. So now, this enterprise-scale healthcare critical server room is cooled by... a bunch of fans and a couple of floorstanding units. I kid you not. Behold, fans, and yes, by that brightly-sunlit south-facing window are a couple more. And that hose (feeding the floorstanding unit) is indeed connected to a bit of cardboard replacing the bottom pane. Yup, cardboard. The window's secured with sticky tape, too.

It's all so damn professional I can't stop giggling.

Comments

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

It's all so damn professional I can't stop giggling.

Hey, when systems fail, you hack together what you have to hack together. Though one might of course suggest that in a server room designated "enterprise"-anything, the A/C should be more dependable, or even have redundant backup.

Speaking of cooling and professionalism, a short tale from one of my previous places of employment follows.

We had just moved to a new server room in a new building, and my boss had tried with great fervor to convince the manager that we should have forced air up through the racks to keep them cool. He balked, so we rigged up temperature sensors in all the racks to show that they sometimes got up over 90 degrees F, which is most assuredly outside the gear's listed ideal operating environment. But, this would cost money, and the manager was unwilling.

A few weeks after this, said manager was getting ready to show some people around the server room. In his wish to look all kinds of cutting-edge, he commandeered a pile of SGI boxes (from another company that was owned by the same folks who owned the company I worked for, which was itself owned by the father of my manager -- that all clear?), put them in a smoked-glass rack, and plugged them in so das lights would blinken. Now, they weren't actually doing anything, of course, but they looked nice. As an added bonus, they were supposed to be doing stuff for the other company, the head admin of which was stalking nervously around the server room, waiting for the dog-and-pony show to end so he could run the boxes back to where they belonged and, hopefully, meet his looming end-of-the-day deadline. (I overheard him say to my boss "Hey, Chris? Would you step on my dick, please? Go ahead, it won't even hurt at this point -- just step on it.")

The manager drifted in with various suited sources of venture capital, proudly showed off the SGI boxen in their rack, and asserted -- I shit you not -- "And we've got forced air up through all the racks to improve reliability."

Fans and cardboard? That's hardly unprofessional at all.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Heh, you win. Unless those fans are still there in Autumn when we get a failure because the rain has made the cardboard soggy...