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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.
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
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
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.
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!
CRT monitors are affected more by low-frequency EMI than the RFI computers emit.
A simple test: Take the lid off of your case, and place it beside the monitor. Nothing strange happens.
Next, place an AC-operated fan, transformer-based soldering iron, or similar magnetic device next to the monitor, and watchen das blinkenrainbow.
That said, flat peices of steel (such as that which comprises your case) do very little to counteract low-frequency magnetism, while aluminum does absolutely nothing. Common steel can have some low-freuquency shielding effect if it's curved just so, but that's usually impractical. (there's other stuff, such as Mu-Metal, which is formulated with the specific goal of blocking EMI, and does work quite well. But it's expensive, and hard to find.)
I have to be careful where I put my Best FerrUPS because the large ferroresonant transformer in it will cause monitors to shake from several feet away.
Problems with computer-generated RFI generally show up with radio and television. I can't listen to an AM radio anywhere near my apartment with the PCs on, and there's a few FM stations that I can only recieve outside or in the back bedroom, away from the machines.
My neighbors must hate me for it, as I'm sure it's not much better anywhere in the building. But the 300-pound, heavy-footed woman upstairs has four kids who wake up at 5:30 AM daily, and the people directly beside me have a bad habit of listening to one-note bass lines with their lousy, one-note subwoofer, directly on the other side of the wall behind my desk.
So, I guess I care a lot less about RFI than I do about proper cooling. Thus, the top of the case is completely absent, allowing all kinds of natural, quiet convection cooling to take place.
Kid-proof tablet..
If the submitter is an anonymous coward, how come there is a link to an e-mail address of jthomas@poweronemedia.com?
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."
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/
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
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.
Hmm.. /. make damn sure you've got the right end of the stick, otherwise you will most definately start giving people the impression (in some cases, the ones that pony up the cash for the gear) that Sun just have stucks up their arses, and are playing the weasel out of it game.
Seems to me the guys that bought this hardware are Sun customers that don't mind shelling out a little cash to buy the necessary hardware.
Putting cold cathode lights on the outside of a case seems to be to be a very poor excuse to get out of a service contract.
Now, if they'd left cables dangling all over the floor, or had coffee stains all down the front of the box, I'd think differently.
However, if this comms room is actually a place where customers are shown round, the non-technical would certainly get a blast from seeing all the cases lit up, and it'd be something they remembered. A bit of a plus over all the 'boring' comms rooms that just hum a little. Something to show the investors on a nice day round.
If they've spent this much on the boxes, I'm damn sure they spent the money to figure out with sun if putting these on invalidated an agreement.
I'm also pretty sure the guy in question worked out what effect this would have on the boxes.
If someone turned up to a site where I'd done pretty much the same thing, and an engineer turned round and refused to touch the machine on that basis, I know that the first thing I'd do is call his boss, and be a little peeved.
And then I'd take it higher.
If the company in question said they'd not support it, then I'd have a very serious think about who would offer a sensible support package.
In my days going round the comms rooms, I've seen far far worse setups, and had them supported.
If you're going to be so picky as to not do something for such a picky reason (hey, the guys who go for cheap memory and processors from Ebay generally don't turn their boxes into showcase pieces like that. They cram what they can quietly into racks and try and make sure nobody sees 'em), then you're on a sure fire way of losing some business. In this day and age, with competition as fierce as it is, I don't think you can afford to do that.
Personally, I'd see this as someone taking PRIDE in their machines, and as such, I'd rather take is as being a good indicator of one that I would want to work on (as the guys are VERY likely to know all the ins and outs of the server, and it's day to day quirks).
I honestly don't know where you get your ideas from, but I think you'd be a firm candidate for a 'jobsworth' award where you'd try and get out of doing anything you absolutely didn't have to, just in case it turned out to be hard work.
If you feel this is just a big, unconsidered flame, then consider. I've done this kind of job in the past, (and moved upwards and onwards), and met many who have done this job also. Some guys are a pleasure to work with, accomodating in most respects (but cut the line at people just being silly arses with things), and some are just cold and trying to weasel out of everything. These days, I go with the companies that offer good service, and decent engineers that actually make a good showing. I drop like hotcakes those that weasel out.
Before you talk about invalidating the warranty, especially in a high profile place like
Bad bad press indeed. And from the Sun techs I've met in the past (quite a few, and from many levels), they'd think this was kind of interesting, and be quite chuffed that people took the pride in their hardware to do this kind of thing.
Just my tuppence worth.
Malk.
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.
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..
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