Server Room

2007-12-07 18:12:10.000 – Steve Welsh,  IT Observer

View From Tower 120707

“So Steve, my buddy, can you move the two racks from the library to the server room” said Ken during Wednesday’s shift change.
“Yes sure no problem” I naively replied.
Little did I know that to get to the said racks would entail excavating through years of accumulated flotsam, discarded debris and the remains of past projects. After several hours of cleaning and sorting, the racks are now in the server room and the library is once again accessible. Some of the more interesting items found included an old camera system, an air bed, a telescope, several hundred weight of empty boxes, oxygen bottles, a microscope, a blow up globe and windows with a great view to the North!

The server room has seen some big changes in the past week or so. We now have a central uninterruptable power supply (UPS) system in place. Until now each computer has had it’s own UPS to handle the frequent power outages and surges that occur up here. The new central system is a lot more efficient and can handle all of our sensitive equipment. We also recently installed an environmental monitoring system, to warn us if the temperature or humidity moves out of range. It may seem strange but the biggest problem we face in the server room is controlling the temperature buildup that can occur. We currently regulate this by opening vents to the outside. Over the past few days the room has been very pleasant, in the low sixties, with all the vents open to the outside, where the air temperature has been around zero. You can imagine what happens when we get a heat wave and the temperature rises into the twenties. Future IT plans include migrating our phone system to TTM over IP and upgrading the version of Linux on our servers.

On the weather side, today has been very interesting. It started out quite clear with the stars and moon visible, however, as the morning progressed the clouds moved in to give some great views of under cast and higher clouds – see the photograph which was taken from the tower around 11am this morning. Later in the afternoon we moved back into freezing fog and snow.

Steve Welsh,  IT Observer