Slashdot Mirror
Computer Room Design?
Onion asks: "My company is considering giving us a new Computer Room, and Command Center, as our existing building is nowhere near meeting current needs, let alone future needs. I have seen a few plans for command center furniture, but no real designs or ideas for the layout of these two rooms. We have five racks for the actual computer room, and need around 25 screens for the command console. Add to this bench space for repairs, and things like: a cupboard, bookshelf, plus more storage space, and the design becomes more complicated. We need enough space for three or four admins. Has anyone seen plans for this type of setup ?"
I'm a little confused here. If you only have 5 racks of servers, why on earth do you need 25 consoles? 5 racsk can easily be controlled with one decent KVM, I prefer Blackbox myself. You also didn't say how much room you have. 25 consoles, even stacked 3 high take up a hell of a lotta room. Get a really good KVM, leave the people that need to be there in the noisy hel of a computer room, and then go back out to your desk and run everything from ssh or a Win2k terminal session. That's the way I do it.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
We're extremely co-located here at my current job. In fact the closest server is two hours from me. (This is for security reasons) Anyway, we do it all with just a few terminals and a whole lot of VNC. I think the best answer for you is to set up a few simple boxen that exist to only run VNC sessions for guests and the like, and then hook up a tunnel encryption to the servers if you are worried about it. I can honestly say that Zebedee has been the easiest thing to set up. It runs over port 11965 if you want to push it out the firewalls as well.
KVM switches rock, but tie you to one location, and then you fight over the terminal with the other admins. When you can do it all from your desk with just a click, why not?