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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?"
adding fancy neon tubes to anything makes it faster.
A. Rightmann
now i have this urge to mod out the old UNIVAC that I have out back in the garage
Geez, I wouldn't have thought an E15k could get slashdotted so quickly.
Damn. I wasn't able to see the page or the pix, but I assume dude voided his warranty on [Dr. Evil]1.3millllion dollars[/Dr. Evil] worth of equipment.
Yeah, might be cool, but I don't think smart.
I didn't get to see the page, so flame away if this is dudes personal equipment. Otherwise, Mr. CFO/CIO is gonna be PISSED.
Sent from your iPad.
I won't be investing 1.3mil in Sun 15ks if they can't survive Slashdot! For that kind of money, I expect it to survive!
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He can watch his machines get slashdotted from the inside now.
Now he's got a curious, glowing white light where his CPU was. /.ed to hell and back a few times, it seems.
Is anyone with windowed cases having problems with electromagnetic interference?
:P
Say you have your CRT right by your window modded case- do you have distorted images on the CRT?
It just seems to me that i would want my system well shielded
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Putting lights outside the case, behind the door is not really a case mod. Don't blame him, I sure as hell wouldn't try to really do that kind of stuff to 1.3 million dollars of equipment, and his mod looks fine.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This guy gets the Too Much Time On His Hands Award of the Week. What's his encore gonna be, a racing stripe on all the Cat-5 cable in the place?
~Philly
Foxwoods (the casino in CT) runs a lot of P-series IBM gear in their server rooms. Apparently they were upset with the fact that IBM's RS/6000 gear comes in black, IBM being "Big Blue", and all. So, they had every IBM rack sent down to Texas so they could be spraypainted blue, at Foxwoods' cost. Not much of a mod, but a hell of a lot of money (which I'm sure they probably recouped in about 15 minutes from the slot machines alone...)
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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.
Not really a case mod, not really warranty voiding.
He just mounted some neon lights inside the case to add some color.
now i gotta find a new hobby ;(
Damn fine idea, It will look good on ours, especially since they have been dimming the lights in the computer room at night.
Now to convince the boss....
Good job, now they look like $1.3m soda machines. He might impress me if he modded them to actually dispense soft drinks on demand!
It has had panels, full of neon lamps. You can :(
write some words using that lamps by writing an auxillary programs. It had thousands of lamps.
You may imagine you are at a starship command deck!
Image is here (old story, b/w photo...
I didn't see anything about them being Windows machines... they're ultrasparcs for crying out loud.
Though I do agree with you on the last point. They make some very fine mice and keyboards.
If the submitter is an anonymous coward, how come there is a link to an e-mail address of jthomas@poweronemedia.com?
...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
Gee whiz guys, it's not really a mod until you install a fishtank inside $1.3 million in hardware...
Now THAT would be impressive...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Sunfire 15k's (To the best of my knowledge there is no model called an E15k, E10k yes), list at closer to around 1.5 million. Granted no one in there right mind pays list for sun hardware thats why you have an account repersentive, in the case of Sun Fire 15k's you most likely have a team. Anyway that sun reseller is slashdotted so the sun store link is http://store.sun.com/ go to the high end servers.
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"
I don't know why the link for the Sun Fire 15K info goes to Nationwide Value Computer (whatever that is) instead of the official Sun site. NVC apparently has no bandwidth, but I'm sure Sun has plenty to spare.
Here's a link to the official site: http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/sunfire15k/
Hydraulics?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
"They look like *vending machines*."
Yes, she can verbalise astericks.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
The glowing blue in particular had the look of "good guy" territory. Can't wait until they get their MCP team up and running...the red neon will make those units look sufficiently evil. Or should I say 3v17? ;-)
What's the matter with a little flash anyway? It doesn't hurt the machines, it brightens up an otherwise boring looking NOC...jeez, get a little sense of aesthetics, if not humor!
Sun should seriously look at this becoming standard equipment on their machines. How much would this add to the cost of their hideously expensive hardware anyway? A little style goes a long way...ask Steve Jobs.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Good god, when will those companies understand, that they ought to make their equipment look nice? This could bring them more money, indirectly. Let me illustrate
:)
:)].
:) ]
1) We buy product X from company Y. We put it in our data center. Company Y got their cash, everything is dandy.
2) Once in awhile, we have to show off our data center to our . Half of the time, the people who are in charge of giving us money are not very technical. They may understand some concepts of this big box has XXX giga/mega/zilion bytes of storage, etc, but in most cases they are like me looking at an airplane engine: ohhh, look it here, it has something cool attached to another neat thing! Ohh, and this little thing is moving! Neato!. Please bear in mind, that I am not making fun of those people, this is just how things work. When somebody doesn't work in your field, they often will focus on things less important than you would. If something moves or blinks, it catches the eye of a viewer. Heck, when we have to give tours around our data center, people spend most time around the robotic tape library, or the cluster of boxes, where there is lots of blinking lights, and it simply looks neat. Our 15k does not compare.
3) When those folks, who give us money, see how neat our data center looks, how spiffy things are, they are usually impressed. What follows is: hey, they are doing well. we spent our money well. heck, we may even let them keep their budget, or maybe we'll add more.. Yes folks, the better your data center looks, the better chances of keeping the job
4) Because of the fact that product X looked so nice, we were given the budget to buy more product X's. Company Y profits.
{God, this made sense in my head when i was thinking, dunno if it makes sense now
Anyway, I know that appearance does not make that big of a difference to a sys admin. But as a sys admin, I'd like if the product X that performs well, would also look nice. It helps me, when the PR department asks me to give a tour of our data center. [or at least assist in answering the questions, I think they learned enough buzz words by now, that they can give the tours themselves
--- d'oh
> Dear Boss,
> You've been wondering what I've been doing for
> the last two weeks. Go check out the server room
> and prepare to be impressed.
That's beautiful.
You're fired.
The Boss
An error occured while loading http://www.rm-r.net/~bri/casemod/:
:-)
Timeout on server
Timed out while waiting to connect to www.rm-r.net
The moral of this story is: it's not what's on the outside, but what's inside that matters.
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Yeah, imagine the options!
"Ok, sir, I hear you're ordering our 2-million-dollar FibreChannel storage server. Would you like that in red, mint green, or silver, sir?"
Oh. AmIbad.
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.
That last picture just looks... menacing.
Now, where did I put that winning lottery ticket?
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
This guy must be fairly decent with his servers. It's one of the few personal-served type websites I've seen that haven't gone under with the slashdot barrage.
He's also got a page crapload of images on the page, which puts more load than a standard 1-2 image HTML page.
I must ask though, who is his employer? Surely these aren't his own machines (at the quoted x-million each?) unless he's also one rich SOB. The employer must be really trusting in this guy to let him mess with expensive machines like this. I wonder how they'll take the energy bill associated with all those fancy lights
Funny this should come up, but just the other day my friend and I were discussing how we could trick the average person into believing we had a supercomputer. It went like this:
1) Take 4 server cases.
2) Weld together.
3) Liberally apply blinking lights, external fans, and colored cabling.
4) Set up a 286 in one of the cases.
5) Write a Basic program to display random 1's and 0's.
The sad thing is, if I invited almost anyone I know over and said "I'm calculating Pi on my supercomputer here", they would all believe it.
Well maybe not the Original Mod but it was definitely something they showed people at the Univ. of Wisconsin CS department. They had a Thinking Machines CM-5 with all these cool blinking LEDs. The department tour always included a viewing of this machine.
Supposedly the LEDs actually represented something. Dunno -- processors working -- error messages -- and so forth.
It was pretty cool back in the day; I mean it oozed computing power despite the fact that it really wasn't that useful a machine.
an effective dog and pony show to impress clients. Plain old raised floor hardware sometimes goes unnoticed and an appreciation for the money invested in the equipment needs a little push.
Tape reels spinning and line printers printing
Warm glowing neon and shiny things glinting
Stacks of brown punch cards tied up with string
These are a few of my favorite things
Dot matrix printers and seven bar segments
Phone bells and switches and papers with pigments
Disk drives that shudder and shimmy and sing
These are a few of my favorite things
Girls in white lab coats with pocket protectors
Logic gates made of lights and reflectors
Heavy equipment suspended with springs
These are a few of my favorite things
When the screen blues, when the cell rings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad.
Yes. That would be the appropriate response. Nonetheless, I'll send my boss a note and see if we can't lay off one of my coworkers to pay for the modification on a few of our servers. ;)
What are you kidding?!
The power bill for lights would be beyond nothing compared to the cost of powering the 15k, not to mention the A/C to cool the damn thing.
When I'm feeling a little bit nefarious at work, I'll slap a big sticker on the side of my PC. When I'm contemplating a problem, I'll color the keys on my board with a Sharpie. And for shits-n-giggles, sometimes I arrange my collection of troll dolls on top of the monitor.
Do these qualify as a case mods?
Now, in the old days when all of a machine's output was through blinkenlights or line printers, it was important to display more diagnostic information on the machines. Now we have consoles and logs, but maybe we don't watch those as often as we should.
I think it would be great if boxmakers could give you an option for a blinkenlights panel that told you a little more about the system's state: processor load, memory load, disk capacity would all be nice. I remember the BeBox's great dual-processor load monitor on twin strips of LEDs along either side of the front of the case. I would probably even pay an extra $100 or so for the extra lights (on a $10K server it's a pretty small incremental addition to the price). If I walked past the machine and saw it was heavily loaded when I didn't expect it to be, I could go check it out and see what was going on.
And if the unused lights just did programmable effects, that would be nice too... it would be a nice, reassuring little "Still here, just waiting for some data to chew on."
Do any of you recall those fantastic red LED covered supercomputers in "Jurassic Park"? I saw a photo of them once in an ad, so I know they're real. Anybody know their name?
Thinking Machines CM-5s.
What would Lemmy do?
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
hey all
:)
seems i've been slashdotted.. (thanks)
the problem with my site is the fact that i never increased the apache server count, so you guys pegged it and it's been refusing connections all day.. sorry about that.. if i had any idea it was going to be this popular i may have bumped it up
anyhow, obviously the web site isn't running on those 15ks - if you look closely at the pictures, they're not even plugged in yet..
some answers:
1. we're not a dot-com..
2. we just took delivery of the 15k's and the adic 10k and decided something needed to be done to spruce them up..
3. it was my bosses idea, actually, he paid for it..
4. we're pretty good friends with sun, i doubt they'll have a problem with it..
5. calling this a 'casemod' is a bit of a joke, i know it's not modding anything in the true spirit of the "case modder", just velcroing lights to it.. like i'm going to take a dremel to something that costs this much - even we have limits.. so sorry for the bruised egos, folks..
6. lots of people are taking this far too seriously..
7. for the network guys - the cisco gear is maxed out, the other blades haven't arrived yet.. the one that's mostly populated will have fiber in the unused areas, the second will be a warm standby copy.. my comment of 'boring' is a dig at the network guy, as this whole thing was meant for my co-workers and close friends, not general consuption..
8. we plan on putting a camera in the adic to watch the robot..
9. these machines are incredibly dense, you can see from the picture, so really the only thing we have to work with are the doors.. even if you think it's lame, you have to admit it's pretty cool..
10. we're still debating about the colors..
thanks a lot to those of you who get it and think this is fun, since that's all it's intended to be.. it's not a folly of having too much money or a pinhead boss, it's just a bunch of unix dorks having fun before we plug the thing in..
bri..
Once upon a time, high-end boxes came pre-modded. But, then the cold war ended and high-end box manufacturers could no longer afford extravagances like that. Of those machines of the last generation of blinken-lights, the Convex Exemplar SPP-1000 was the most kickass looking computer system ever designed.
Check it out
(As you can see, they were so kick-ass they not only walked on water, they hovered above it!)
Those yellow-green light-bars that go up the front, over the top and down the back are actually fully programmable individual one-inch lights. These boxes came with code to do all kinds of fancy effects with the blinken-lights, such as a ping-pong effect, or racing dots that went at different speeds depending on the load of the machine.
Although the pictures only show the base metallic-purple skins, you could order them with one of 20 different color schemes. The Scripps Research Institute got theirs in a very bright red, as you can see.
Ultimately, Convex got bought by HP and all future designs from that group were exceedingly dull-looking, until finally, just last week, HP laid off a boat-load of the Convex engineers because HP doesn't need technical expertise anymore - they are Microsoft's largest partner!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
why do such a thing, how would that look to the corporate bigwigs when they walk into your server room, and see a ridiculous-looking contraption with blinking lights and windows and sound responsive leds......well I will tell you, they will think that it is wicked awesome
I hate sigs.
Just FWIW, the official Sun-branded 2x4 is Part # 414-1100-01.
...
Just check next time you get an Enterprise or Sun Fire server on a pallet
--NBVB
Your cat in the sink is a classic. ;)
A perfect place for a cat I spose, except for the fact it has a tap hovering right over it's head....Ignorance is bliss
Talk to CmdrTaco about that. It's gotta be a bug in the slashcode, no? (The submission form lets you put in an email address and if you aren't logged in, then you are posting as anonymous coward, but because the display for the first page does a mailto: on the poster's name.)
The fat geek who dies told you - they're Connection Machines CM5s. Also seen in a few other movies (I wanted to say wargames, but I don't think it was - it played the part of some other pentagon/norad computer anyway).
The LEDs are the state for all the processor boards - CM5s used a whole heap of massively parallel microprocessors. Here's a pic of a 512-node one. According to this the processors are Sparcs. I vaguely remember an article in Omni (a long time ago) that said they were with 6502s or Z80s - maybe that was a previous model, or a strange dream.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Here is another mirror: http://www2.shuman.org:8082/mirror/www.rm-r.net/~b ri/casemod/
:)
For now, all the sizes are there. We will see how long that lasts
We had to have a forced power outage while they were installing power cutover, so they could service the UPSes in our rather aged datacenter.
As we had between 2-4 hours that we were going to be down, as we hadn't gotten approval for a maintenance window in over a year, we moved some disk arrays around, replaced out some old sun "Mass Storage" racks [30" wide cabinet, 28RU, single power] for "Expansion Cabinets" [24" wide, 36U, dual powered].
In the process, we also moved a few systems that were in a rack that was primarily filled with a system going out of production, and cleaned up a signficant chunk of the rats nest of cabling behind these cabinets.
We were thanked by the data center management for making everything look nicer. [Not placing the systems with redundant power supplies in a rack with redundant power supplies, preventing future downtime for systems, creating more room in the machine room, etc, etc, etc] Hell, we weren't even directly thanked for pulling it off with less than 2 weeks notice, and only losing one system in the process [Sparc Storage Array 200, which had been in service for over 6 years with no signficant downtime]
Oh...and even more important than looking nice -- it helps if it actually fits through the door, and doesn't cause the floor to buckle.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
These people have made the Sun look cooler than the IBM x86 rack, and maybe it'll make the IT managers buy more Sun! Raise my stock value! Make me more money! Woo-hoo!
Sorry.. had to say it..
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I'd like some Enterprise SOFTWARE to work on. In particular, Subcommander T'Pol.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I got last post.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.