NANOGers home data centers - What's in your closet?

Sat Aug 13 13:31:13 UTC 2011

> On 08/12/2011 09:17 PM, Joe Greco wrote:
> >> What nobody wired their abode with fiber ?
> >>
> >> Am i the only one here
> > I ran a bunch of fiber from the telco rack
> 
> What's in the telco rack? This is in your house? What's on it?

Demarc and lightning suppressors for T1, 2xISDN BRI, DSL, cable,
satellite, a USR Courier V.Everything for backup paging, a USR
Courier I-Modem for 56K-capable OOB dialin to the network, which
will have some people today scratching their heads, but made
sense back in 2000.  I killed our ISDN service earlier this year
because VoIP has become a better choice for voice and because I 
hadn't been stranded in any hotels without Internet or 3G coverage 
in like half a decade; the OOB dial-in simply wasn't being used
any more, and I deemed it obsolete.

Technically that's all on the plywood and not on the rack itself. 
The rack is where all the house ethernet terminates, and also
holds switches for the house ethernet, an Adtran 550 for format
conversion (BRI/POTS/etc -> T1) to our Asterisk environment, the
Asterisk box that has a T1 card to handle that, some KVM-over-IP
gear in the DMZ, two managed power strips, two rack ATS's, and
three APC 1400's (one of which backs up the two primary units).

Most of my stuff runs between moderately old to seriously ancient,
because a lot of it is gear that's been recycled out of data center
production use.

> >  to the server rack to reduce
> > the risk of damage to expensive servers ...  it's likely to be
> > meaningless but it is just a little extra precaution.  The server rack
> > is at least a little bit isolated from everything else.
> 
> Servers have fiber cards? Or is it fiber between switches only?

http://www.sol.net/tmp/nanog/serverrack.jpg

No laughing, it's in the messy phase, I'll get all ticked off in a
few months and clean it all up again.  But that only happens every
year or two.

Three switches in the top of the server rack, with a 2xGE LACP trunk
running in a loop through them; four multimode fibers go from there
to the telco rack as part of that loop to the switches in the telco
rack.  Then there's fiber over to the workshop bench switch to keep
that electrically isolated as well.  The OOB management network also
has a 10Mbps fiber between the telco rack and the server rack.  So
I think it never got to the point where I was using more than seven
of the dozen runs.

I never really originally intended to make much use of the server
rack; it was meant as a place to stick rack mount gear being played
with or fixed, and as a home for the house fileserver.  However, as
luck would have it, in 2004? 2005?  I had reason to re-examime the
way we were running things, and it became clear that there was an
obvious split between stuff that was high-bandwidth-100%-availability
and low-bandwidth-just-should-be-available, and so I closed our Milw
POP and moved the high bandwidth stuff out to Ashburn, and the low
bandwidth stuff here.  Saved hundreds of dollars per month plus also
reduced heating bills in the winter.  :-)  

Some of that's been reduced through virtualization of course, but
growth in the network always seems to kind of balance that out
somewhat.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
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