Visiting back home in Germany, I decided to see my cousins Achim and Michael who work for a company that has grown to 580 employees in the last three years. By most standards, this is a medium sized business. I love visiting there because you can literally watch the datacenter grow every year. Seeing how an environment with more than 15,000 virtual servers is managed from only ten screens in a network operation center is a real treat - especially for someone like me that humbly lives to serve Small Business Server networks.
Four years ago, there were only a couple of server closets in the basement filling up about a quarter of the room, and now it has grown to fill the entire basement. Imagine three rows of what you see in the picture shown here and then picture overflow into adjoining rooms. The floor is raised and made of some space-age material - walking past all the server closets eminating a low hum - makes me feel like I'm in some sort of sci-fi movie. Cool.
The hardware has changed as well since my last visit. There are still a couple of "old" racks that are in the process of being converted, (shown left below) and the data center runs mostly on HP blades now (shown right below). Try to get your small business client keeping up with the pace of hardware changes like here - good luck. If you wonder how I get access to this cool, high-secure area - its simple. Just gotta now people in high places, in this case it's my cousin Michael that is one of the system operators . He really loves his job now since working with blades and the virtual environment made his life much simpler compared to 18 years ago when he first started. Now he has time to take me on a tour without having to run back to the network operations center (NOC) every five minutes.
The picture below is the new IBM System z9 enterprise class server hosting six virtual servers, server downtime is now at 0.00%! The host domain for all of the systems is managed on Windows Server 2003 requiring four system administrators alone to manage the Active Directory administration. Now that is cool - and I certainly would not want to have that job, these guys have to actually work I am told. I really wanted to take the z9 home, but I am not sure it would fit into the space in my house where I keep my servers. Then again, there is always the garage.
I missed taking a picture of the SAN which is about the same size as the z9, I think you get the picture though. All of this is backed up to a huge robotic drive closet in a separate, fire proof room. The picture below is taken inside the robotic drive closet, I could have stepped into it if not for the middle part which is the robotic arm that shuttles back and forth at an incredible speed. Sort of hard to tell from the picture, but that drive arm shoots back and forth moving tapes around in the slots you can see here on the sides. All the backup tapes can be managed of a single screen on the outside of this tape drive closet - truly amazing.
The robotic backup systems (yes, there is more than one down here) are in a specially built backup vault with walls that are about 10” thick and encased in a special fireproof material. The backup vault is locked through a door that operates like a safe door to a bank vault. Take a good look at the picture above showing part of the outside of one tape drive closet and above see the pipe on the ceiling with a copper end? That pipe dispenses carbon dioxide (CO2) in case of a fire. Once I found that out I was glad to leave the backup vault rather quickly. But you wouldn't really want to sprinkle water on the equipment in case of a fire, or would you? And as you guessed, the tape drive closets are not the last resort; tape drives are removed and stored off-site in another high-secure area, just in case! Hm and no, I cannot tell you what kind of data is kept here.
My cousin Achim who is the print operator is fixing a printer jam in one of the print machines below – the printers are about 50 feet in length and easily kick out a 100,000 double-sided pages print job without a sputter in a matter of an hour or two. And there are four humangous printers here, and a separate machine that custom makes the envelopes for all that is printed here. The sheer size of the equipment of this "M" business is overwhelming.
It’s always a treat for me (a Small Business Specialist) to visit the datacenter and get a snoop of how the “M” space operates. And for the record, I was never there. J
If I ever were to get the urge to work in a medium-sized company, I’ll go visit my cousins and take a look at one of the wiring closets. Even Michael gets a headache looking at it as you can see in the shot below. There is a mix of CAT5 and fiber, good thing that everything is labeled, but that doesn't mean there arent any mishaps. Recently there was an upgrade on virtual and physical routers. One of the physical routers was forgotten and low and behold, the entire data center lost connectivity. It was bad to the point that the VoIP wasn't working either and an emergency support call had to be made using the landline. It makes me feel better knowing that despite all the technology and support and big brains that go into this operation, issues are no different than what occurs in the SMB world, just on a much larger scale. Very scary. In the end, its still just the management of data and its still a network. Guess it's just the sheer size that is a bit intimidating. I think I'll stick with the "S" in SMB and Small Business Server.
