The Big D

Back and by popular demand, I’ve got a new set of pictures for you! About a week ago, I was in Dallas, where I did a little investigatory photo-journalism in our offices and in a couple of our data centers. I could add a disclaimer on the picture quality, but if you’ve endured the last few picture-laden posts, you’re probably desensitized to the blurred focus and poor photo composition.

If you were to drive South on I-35E through Dallas, you’ll see one of The Planet’s offices on your right-hand side just before you got to the home of the Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Stars.

Trendy, contemporary, stylish, post modern? Office buildings like this one make me want to pretend to be an architect (like George Costanza).

Did you think the stylishness was going to be left with just the exterior? You should be embarrassed about being so wrong. On the right side of the hall, you will see a large white paper with hand-written notes. This poster was created at a recent meeting where every manager committed to improving some aspect of our business, and it is displayed prominently to remind our team of the goals we set.

As you can see, we don’t relegate the fluorescent pink ethernet cables to the data centers, but the keen observer will note that the cables didn’t make it too far away from a data center. This conference room (called Asteroids) overlooks a small portion of our D2 data center.

The window in the upper-left corner of this image is the conference room from the previous picture. D2 is one of The Planet’s legacy data centers. As you can see, the central floorspace is occupied predominantly by cages and cabinets with no overhead cabling. How do the cables get run? I thought you’d never ask …

In data center tours of this facility, these plexiglass sections are a big attraction. The cable tray is run under the floor to get the cables to their respective destinations. I mentioned how raised our “raised flooring” is in the “Data Centric” post, but I snapped a perspective picture for you from D6:

Before you cry “Foul!” on this picture, I should explain that the Dr. Pepper bottle in this picture was not opened in the data center … it’s simply one of the most standard heights I had to give a good perspective of the floor’s height.

I am starting to believe that the bright colors used on the cabling in our data centers is meant specifically to keep me from taking a clear picture of a hot row.

I realized after the previous data center post that I didn’t include any pictures of the other side of a server row, so I made sure to include one in this post. Aren’t the blue lights soothing? If you walk down this aisle, you feel like you need to be listening to Blue Train (which happens to be the album playing through my headphones right now).

Here is another beautiful picture of the side of the server that really matters. This Clovertown rack again features the organization I explained previously: every cable is individually numbered and assigned to a specific box to make server identification as quick and easy as possible.

Cut so short? No!!! Well, the mark of a great storyteller is the ability to leave an audience wanting more, so while I have a few more pictures of the backbones of the data centers (power, generators, network, GNOC, etc.), I’ll save those for a rainy day.

- Kevin

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Data Centers, Evangelist's Corner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.