So, where to begin… let’s see… we start with the POWER9 at home on my desk, and me looking a wreck in the morning…

Where is this wonderful place that brings me so much joy? Hurricane Electric of course.

For Silicon Valley datacenter nerds, Hurricane Electric’s Fremont and San Jose facilities are the spiritual home of budget-friendly colo: cabinet and partial-cabinet plans with same-day turn-up, straightforward BGP, and native v6 on a backbone that’s been aggressively peering since the early 2000s, making it a historically significant and still notably affordable place to park gear in the Bay Area.

And as such… it’s where most of my gear resides. What was once a HomeLab at home has become a situation of _“let’s move everything into the colo and tell PG$E to suck it on their $300-600/month apartment electric bills (which is physically impossible, they’re a proven CA Governor sponsored monopoly).

Tools and So Forth

How about a photo of my lovely Wera designed Datacenter tool bag? Yes! It’s rugged and strong and doesn’t distort with heavy items. Love it. At the top of the photo is whichever purse happened to be brought along that day; Kors or Burbs or Coach or whichever fit size requirements at the time.

Not shown: a squared-rasp-file occasionally required for “standardizing” the rail mounting holes in those old-ass blue racks. My right hand still has scars from years ago - before owning that rasp to fix the burrs.

Always Getting Injured, but that’s OK.

Now, about those old scars - there are surely new ones periodically. While getting ready for the colo, just standing at the sink with some sheers, cutting… cutting… and ohffs that’s my finger. Yep, it’s definitely deep! Apply pressure! Wrap it tight! Not too tight though… and what was at my disposal? Paper medical tape and clear plastic industrial packing tape.

FINE. It’s FINE. The bleeding mostly stopped, and off we go to the datacenter!

done cut my self real bad

Networking, Servers, Drives, DPUs, and all the other fun!

Ok, enough rambling. Here’s a photo gallery with annotated pics. Each rack has some major revisions to undergo, which requires planning and documentation updates and all the usual production readiness routines.

More Hardware - More ARM64!

Now you may wonder, where is all of my ARM64 equipment and the other clusters? Those are still in the 2x 25U racks at home – they’ll be migrated to the colo as well, once I convert them to use industrial Compact-PCI chassis blade mounts with integrated/redundant power and backplane. I bring you… the ADLINK cPCIS-2632R 3U Compact PCI chassis.

Industrial ADLINK cPCIS-2632R CompactPCI

SATA3… Really?

And we wrap up the day’s fun with… decisions on what to do with these SATA3 SSDs recovered from some old R420 systems… perhaps the LC922 boxes can use those + some 240GB Intel or Samsung boot drives. These days I never bother with SATA, only SAS or NVMe. HoHumBoringSataSoSlow.

A Tale of Two Labs - One is Real, The Other…

I love having my own hardware for my own labs. I love not having to rely on a corporation over-promising on lab resources for the architecture design process – real physical hardware which is absolutely required for “Proof of Concept Engineering”.

As a wise-one once related, not everything can be a Power Point Presentation. Engineers need physical hardware for validation workflows, otherwise it’s all just vaporware.

🙉 🙈 🙊