It occured to me today that a section of my basement is starting to resemble a data center:
The four machines here:
- Are all test machines, or being configured and burned in for future deployment – the production hardware for our projects invariably ends up in customers’ data centers or in robust colo facilities (redundant power, massive air conditioning, redundant “tier one” network connectivity, etc.)
- All use AMD CPUs – two of them have dual-core Athlon64 X2’s.
- Are all black – black is still the default color, it appears.
Other tidbits:
- The leftmost machine is a “Shuttle XPC”.
- The shelves are homemade and very strong.
- Three of the machine run only Linux; the other dual-boots to Windows XP.
- Very little work happens on these machine at the physical console – they are accessed via SSH, VNC, Terminal Services, etc.
- There is a dedicated 15 amp circuit to run these machines.
- The reason they are here, in my basement, is so that the hardware and OS can be configured. When one becomes wedged it can easily be rebooted or diagnosed at the terminal; that happens all to often when, for example, trying a variety of Linux kernels to get virtualuzation working .