On 08/13/2011 08:26 AM, David Swafford wrote:
I'm borrowing a room at mom's place for this presently :-D, as the 1 bedroom apartment was a bit too small!
I've got a two bedroom apartment currently. Seriously considering a 3 bedroom place. So I can have a dedicated server room/office and a guest room. Right now guest room serves as server room and living room is the office.
It has 2 racks -- a 2post and a full server cabinent. The racks are physically on separate sides of the room, so I've got a custom cable tray running along the walls, that's about a foot below the ceiling.
Nice. Another reason that apartments are annoying. Limited mods. Though one could make the mods and just patch holes when they leave. I wanted to drill a hole to the outside at my apartment and patch when we left. The wife said no. LOL. It's cool though, cause she doesn't bat an eye when I mention buying a 72U rack. :)
Between the racks are 24-port patch panels for cross-connect needs.
Hmmm. Between racks you mean? Or from ports in wall to switch?
Power is the fun part: I installed a 50AMP, 240V, subpanel in the above room (with permits/inspection), and am feeding 1 x 240 to each rack and also 1 x 120 to the 2-post.
Ah yes. Power. This is what will drive me to a colo. I'm sure of it. I don't want to rely on household wiring for heavy duty loads.
Each rack's power is handled by remotely managed power controllers. I've found that maintaining UPS batteries became too expensive, given the age and present value of my gear, so everything is direct w/o UPS support. Since I've got full power control, most of the gear remains off until I'm actively using it for studies.
Excellent. This is what I do as well. Though the PDUs that I picked up don't work with my current wiring. :(
To conserve electric use, I rarely use additional AC, though I have a portable unit in the room for when the need arises -- average temp runs about 85 in that room.
Nice.
The routing gear is a mix of Cisco 2600s, 3600s, and 4500s (yep, those are a little old!); The switching gear is a mix of Cisco 3550s, 3560s, and 2950s; The server gear is mostly IBM xSeries, in the age range of about 5-7 years old.
Perfectly suitable for a wide variety of applications. Only things worth swapping out on a regular basis are drives.
Connectivity from my apartment to the lab is over a site-to-site VPN. What kind of bandwidth in between?
I've also got a Cisco call manager express (on a 1760) running my mom's phone service and have phones throughout her house and my apartment.
Nice. I've not dabbled with Cisco voip at all. Just Freeswitch/Asterisk (abandoned Asterisk and exclusively Freeswitch these days).
Production storage is on a QNAP NAS back at my apartment.
I believe this is the second mention of QNAP in this thread.
The above room is about 180 square feet. It sits next to the garage and kitchen, and to make it look more official I took out the door and replaced it w/ a plastic doorway like you see in big grocery freezers. The plastic made it easier to get in/out with gear without scratching up the house and it also helps mute out some of the fan-noise.
Excellent idea. Do you have a ramp of some sort to bring gear in? -- Charles N Wyble charles@knownelement.com @charlesnw on twitter http://blog.knownelement.com Building alternative,global scale,secure, cost effective bit moving platform for tomorrows alternate default free zone.