Visiting a Data Center next Week

[RedCOMET]

Hey AT Network gurus,

I'm doing a a summer internship and my department was able to get a group of us new hire and interns a tour of one of their data centers. I was told they have 5 data centers of varying size, and this particular one is about 80k sq ft.

So, AT network gurus, while I'm on the tour oogling all the equipment and racks, are there any questions I should be asking the DC people, or things I should be observing?

 

[Lithium381]

leave breadcrumbs and don't get separated from the group.

 

[somethingsketchy]

leave breadcrumbs and don't get separated from the group.

+1 that and don't piss off security.

 

[yinan]

Dont touch anything.

 

[stash]

Dress in layers.

 

[spidey07]

Ask how network service is delivered to the DC and have them show it to you. It may be in a different room.

Ask how they are dealing with the explosion of 10 gig ethernet and VMware.

Ask if they've considered data center bridging.

 

[ViviTheMage]

Hopefully it looks nothing like FDC's data center!

http://vivithemage.com/zen/blog/bad_datacenter/

 

[Harrod]

Dont touch anything.

This, I remember when I worked in a datacenter a few years ago, the cleaning people were constantly screwing stuff up when they were cleaning, the best was the security guard who was surfing porn on the printserver when all of the operators were off shift on Sunday. Dude was trying to save it to 3.5 inch floppies.

 

[Eug]

Ask them where they keep them intarnets tubes.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Hopefully it looks nothing like FDC's data center!

http://vivithemage.com/zen/blog/bad_datacenter/

ha, DC full of Desktops, what-da-fvck.

OP, ask them how to stop script kiddies from hacking their interwebs. And tell them they need more megagigabytes

 

[drebo]

Hopefully it looks nothing like FDC's data center!

http://vivithemage.com/zen/blog/bad_datacenter/

Surprised to see actuall Cisco 6500 switches in there...a place like that would generally tend toward pfsense or some stupid shit like that.

 

[ViviTheMage]

Surprised to see actuall Cisco 6500 switches in there...a place like that would generally tend toward pfsense or some stupid shit like that.

Yeah, that was probably one of their clients, not their gear, haha.

 

[heymrdj]

ha, DC full of Desktops, what-da-fvck.

OP, ask them how to stop script kiddies from hacking their interwebs. And tell them they need more megagigabytes

FDC specializes in Colo, that's most likely racks of client systems.

 

[ch33zw1z]

FDC specializes in Colo, that's most likely racks of client systems.

Thanks for the info, it's still racks of stand-alones in a DC. Serious waste of space and makes for terrible cable management among other problems...

 

[Lanyap]

Hopefully it looks nothing like FDC's data center!

http://vivithemage.com/zen/blog/bad_datacenter/

Looks like it might be their Chicago DC.

http://www.fdcservers.net/datacenter_chicago_pics.php

 

[RedCOMET]

Ask how network service is delivered to the DC and have them show it to you. It may be in a different room.

Ask how they are dealing with the explosion of 10 gig ethernet and VMware.

Ask if they've considered data center bridging.

I've just googled "data center bridging" and am Still not sure what it is.. can you explain to a newb? I'll be sure to ask the other questions.

OP, ask them how to stop script kiddies from hacking their interweb

I'll be sure to polish this questions before I ask it.

any thing else guys? Like perhaps why buy a used data center vs building a new one? ( hint they bought this data center from another company)

 

[somethingsketchy]

From what I am interpreting of the Wikipedia article for "Data Center Bridging" (I know, not exactly a reliable source of information), but anyways it appears it's a new Ethernet standard to reduce or eliminate dropped packets, among other things. Basically more stringent data loss prevention.

I could certainly be wrong about that.

 

[Cooky]

Ask:
Do you do geo-clusters or VMotion between datacenters?
If active/active, how do you handle synchronization between the databases in each datacenter?
If you use Cisco's GSS to handle load balancing between datacenters, how do you handle clients who have cached the DNS record/IP of the datacenter that just failed?

 

[spidey07]

Ask:
Do you do geo-clusters or VMotion between datacenters?
If active/active, how do you handle synchronization between the databases in each datacenter?
If you use Cisco's GSS to handle load balancing between datacenters, how do you handle clients who have cached the DNS record/IP of the datacenter that just failed?

How? Dcb and trill!

 

[Cooky]

How? Dcb and trill!

I thought Trill or FabricPath was meant to be used within each datacenter boundary, and not between datacenters.
You probably meant to say LISP.

Some of the other members were wondering what you meant by DCB/Datacenter Bridging.
Do you care to explain?
I assume it's anything that can help put hosts on the same L2 network between DC's, such as OTV or AToM, but wanted to confirm.

 

[novasatori]

Hopefully it looks nothing like FDC's data center!

http://vivithemage.com/zen/blog/bad_datacenter/

nice we rent a bunch of servers from FDC, and these pics don't surprise me

their prices are pretty good, or were good when we first got all our servers, no idea how they are now

 

[chuck2002]

How often do you test your backup generators? Sometimes it is the obvious stuff that gets overlooked.....