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Casemodding Enterprise Hardware
Anonymous Coward writes "Think your tower case with led fans, a cold cathode and a window is cool? See what this guy did to two Sun Enterprise 15Ks -- a casemod on $1.3 million dollars of hardware! Will mainframes start shipping with light and window options now?"
I mean, for $1.3 Million Sun could at least offer some cosmetic options. Not that it's the kind of stuff people keep in their living room (although...), but if I'd shell out that kind of money for a badass server, I'd want it to look awesome!
My personal taste would go towards a single colour for the whole array, all red or all blue.
Cheers,
max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Remember when machine rooms contained computers that were lined with lots of 'blinken lights'? Think Wargames. Think of the Thinking Machines TM-5. Most computers don't have much in the way of lights on them anymore. All the information in conveyed using a network connection, an LCD or a video output.
Communication gear is a little better. There is usually a light for each link and data. When there is lots of traffic, the data lights blink furiously.
Marketing generally doesn't have are product requirements for the coolness factor of a given piece of equipment. They may have indicator requirements (red indicators are vary bad in may places). But sometimes some cool code gets through that uses otherwise unused or idle lights. I remember one vendor who programmed their network switch to have a waterfall pattern on the LEDs of their unused ports. A rack of these devices added some color to an otherwise dull machine room or equipment rack.
-tpg
The "boring router switchy things" pic appears to show two (2) Cisco Catalyst 6513 chassis with dual-redundant supervisor modules. Yeesh... Depending on the options, there's another $200K in gear right there.
How can this company be doing well enough to afford this gear, yet be dumb enough to let their people "case mod" the E15K's?
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
...or at least the service contract I'm assuming they bought.
I do service contract support for Sun gear, and on the high end stuff they (sun) would definitly have the option of walking away from one of these things on a service call. Personally, I know I'd be tempted to do so.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
While everyone is thinking this guy is gonna loose his job, I bet he gets a lot more IT $$$ than other sys admins. I can't recall the number of times we spent big buck on cutting edge hardware that makes the organization flow smoother, only to get blank stares from administrators who come buy to see what they just spent all that money on. The more blinken lights on hardware, the more the managers feel like it's doing something. Show one of your managers a network closet with the lights low, and see thier eyes light up at all the fascinating lights. It kinda mesmorizes them. The perfect time to ask for more $$ for your department. Expensive IBM/Sun servers suffer from lack of flair big time.
A lot of company's I have worked at like to place there data center in a semi-public place. My old building had a large glass window that separated their reception area with from a portion of the data center. Mind you that security was not compromised as all monitors where some one could oversee any pertinent information where not viewable from the reception area. This was a concern that was addressed. This little 'building mod' added a bit of esteem to the office. People who came into the office allways spent at least 10-15 mins looking at the servers becouse the room was just impressive. Like some one mentioned earlier, if a person who is not technically inclined sees a impressive data center it might influence them in some way, and it just looks damn cool.
You me and every one else on this board would appreciate them at face value, I know the difference between the quality of NETGEAR and CISCO, but most do not. Lights and cosmetics influence a lot of decisions, don't underestimate looks, they do play a big role.
The green one especially...it looks like something from a Borg cube, especially when the door is open. :)
Ack! I can't get to my server that's sitting on the rack beside bri's machine (rm-r.net). Y'all stop trying to get there for a few minutes so I can retrieve my email.. ok? Thanks :)
chown -R us
I guess it depends on the business but sometimes blinkenlights do actuall sell services. When I worked for one of the major providers of EFT services, every customer tour of the data center included bringing the customer into the comm room. Fourty Tandem. IBM and EMC cabinets sitting on a raised floor is about as interesting looking as a warehouse full of watercoolers. But when you take a customer into a room where hundreds of comm lines terminate and cause their panels to blink franticly the customer usually gets that "wow" look. The trip past the actual hardware was necessary because of the layout of the building otherwise I'd be willing to bet the salespeople would have skipped that section.
If that doesn't impress the customer, sales people have also been known to show customers how the emergency stop button shuts down the data center (actually happened once).
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing