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moofin_men 4 hours ago [-]
I used to travel doing optical networking deployments between data centers. Got to see a good 35+ states and even some foreign countries over 4 years or so but also completely burnt out. Telecom is a pretty miserable industry.
Most of the work in/around DCs is contract of some sort. Local structured cabling firms, electricians doing stints of various lengths, security, etc. Some of it good and lucrative, some of it not.
moxli 2 hours ago [-]
I did the same in europe and burnt out with my colleague after ~3 years.
Working and driving at night, barely enough sleep and overtime compensation during the time the body needs to recover was the worst.
I probably aged 10 years in that time.
PaulRobinson 1 hours ago [-]
I started out in a "data centre" in 1998/1999 in the North West of England. Things are radically different now.
When I joined that ISP we had ~2000 subscribers, and one modem rack that could take 30 concurrent 33.6k dial-ins. The company had just been acquired by a small independent telco in Cheshire, headquartered in a small town that is most famous for a weekly farmers market and an annual steam rally.
We shared that headquarters at first with the founder's other business - a dating agency for rich people in later years - and slowly took over.
The building was a farmhouse of sorts. We'd turned into a rabbit warren of offices, and then, we decided to expand.
First we turned one of the offices into a "machine room". We didn't even bother with fire suppression that first time, we just ripped up the carpet and laid some laminate, put some 19" racks in and got the power upgraded. The air-con was insufficient in that room and the following summer I had to wheel in portable units and had a Cisco router in there report that the inlet fan had a temperature of ~80C. That was around the same time the chief of staff was asking us why we wore jeans and t-shirts and couldn't we wear suits? No, no we could not wear suits.
Bit by bit we took over more rooms through the building, we started working in a portacabin in the car park (where the neighbouring farmer's sheepdog would join us for lunch).
At some point we needed to install ~20k modems, (Nortel CVX1800s - 56kbps had arrived!), and the telephone switch to run it, so somebody bought a second hand DMS100 that went into another room we had converted.
By that point the dating agency had moved out.
We needed another ~100 servers as well to manage email, web hosting, and so on. Those came in parts (motherboards, cases, RAM sticks, hard drives - about £500k worth in 1999 money), and we had to build them and install BSD on them (first OpenBSD, then FreeBSD, long story). We also had to make our own ethernet cables, which is where I learned I can't wire ethernet cables if my life depended on it.
Within 12 months from when we started, we were handling 750,000 dial-in customers.
Around September of 1999 I left and that was when the company had heard about a custom built data centre that was up for sale in Milton Keynes, so decided to move everything there. Around that time they were pouring concrete under the floors of all those rooms we'd thrown racks in because the timber floor joists (!) were starting to give way under the weight of the kit.
That company got acquired and then went through a weird route, but basically it's still going as a major UK ISP. I'll keep the name private to protect the guilty. :)
2000 subscribers, and one modem rack to that and a business still operating 27 years later. A lot of sausage rolls, plenty of sticking plasters for the cuts from those shitty cases, and almost every day ending with a couple of pints in a pub somewhere.
One of my old colleagues and I often think back to that being one of the best years of work in our lives. But... data centre work is horrid, dirty, hot, and underpaid for what it is. But you can - sometimes - be part of something kind of cool and fun, and something very few people get to see or understand.
But there's a reason I've stuck to software ever since. :)
marysol5 1 hours ago [-]
>We also had to make our own ethernet cables, which is where I learned I can't wire ethernet cables if my life depended on it.
Are you me? would always take me about 10 attempts to even get one where all the pins would light up on a tester. But not good enough for high-speed data.
Kids these days, don't know when they were born. They have push-through RJ45 now, piece of piss and you never have one shorter than the other.
I don't miss on-site/DC infrastructure anymore. No more having to squeeze into tiny spaces, balance a lot of expensive kit on your head, and blood donations to the server gods.
Compute is so ubiquitous now I only have like 2 nodes in my lab anyway
philipwhiuk 2 hours ago [-]
It's bizarre that Digital Realty wants to put a DC in a town centre. Surely the latency disadvantage from being outside city limits is neligible.
jve 1 hours ago [-]
Don't know about US, but I work within European Datacenter where we intend to have excess heat to be used for residential building heating [1]. You must be in proximity of the consumer for this to be possible. Not necessarily center is needed, but even then, DCs can be pretty :)
For example our office is heated using heatpump that has >22C of water heated by equipment as a source.
It is crazy how you see so many datacenters getting built in places of high land value such as say northern virginia. Why not just build them in west virginia and build twice as many for the same spend? They'd probably even let you burn coal to power them.
lordnacho 35 minutes ago [-]
I'm guessing it's to do with regulation. There's probably some policy document that says a certain org needs to be able to access the physical servers within a certain amount of time, and so they need to be nearby, even though nobody ever does the accessing.
DC would be the kind of place with a lot of government contractors that would have this kind of stipulation, is my guess.
liquidpele 25 minutes ago [-]
Nearby skilled labor, police/fire infrastructure willing to handle it, and ease of demo/tours/sales for clients to install their racks. Also much more stable power.
pjc50 35 minutes ago [-]
I suspect it's driven by availability of existing grid infrastructure (so they don't have to wait for upgrades) and ease of permitting; the contents of the building and indeed running costs are so high that the land value is much less relevant.
firesteelrain 31 minutes ago [-]
There is a lot of electrical supply and demand is high plus incentives from Virginia itself and proximity to DC. It’s already a data center dense market
christkv 4 hours ago [-]
At my first job in a bank there was an old-timer whose job had been to fly to every trading desk the bank had in other countries to install software updates. He would do a round the world trip 1-2 times a year with multiple duplicate boxes of floppies during 3-4 weeks.
Most of the work in/around DCs is contract of some sort. Local structured cabling firms, electricians doing stints of various lengths, security, etc. Some of it good and lucrative, some of it not.
When I joined that ISP we had ~2000 subscribers, and one modem rack that could take 30 concurrent 33.6k dial-ins. The company had just been acquired by a small independent telco in Cheshire, headquartered in a small town that is most famous for a weekly farmers market and an annual steam rally.
We shared that headquarters at first with the founder's other business - a dating agency for rich people in later years - and slowly took over.
The building was a farmhouse of sorts. We'd turned into a rabbit warren of offices, and then, we decided to expand.
First we turned one of the offices into a "machine room". We didn't even bother with fire suppression that first time, we just ripped up the carpet and laid some laminate, put some 19" racks in and got the power upgraded. The air-con was insufficient in that room and the following summer I had to wheel in portable units and had a Cisco router in there report that the inlet fan had a temperature of ~80C. That was around the same time the chief of staff was asking us why we wore jeans and t-shirts and couldn't we wear suits? No, no we could not wear suits.
Bit by bit we took over more rooms through the building, we started working in a portacabin in the car park (where the neighbouring farmer's sheepdog would join us for lunch).
At some point we needed to install ~20k modems, (Nortel CVX1800s - 56kbps had arrived!), and the telephone switch to run it, so somebody bought a second hand DMS100 that went into another room we had converted.
By that point the dating agency had moved out.
We needed another ~100 servers as well to manage email, web hosting, and so on. Those came in parts (motherboards, cases, RAM sticks, hard drives - about £500k worth in 1999 money), and we had to build them and install BSD on them (first OpenBSD, then FreeBSD, long story). We also had to make our own ethernet cables, which is where I learned I can't wire ethernet cables if my life depended on it.
Within 12 months from when we started, we were handling 750,000 dial-in customers.
Around September of 1999 I left and that was when the company had heard about a custom built data centre that was up for sale in Milton Keynes, so decided to move everything there. Around that time they were pouring concrete under the floors of all those rooms we'd thrown racks in because the timber floor joists (!) were starting to give way under the weight of the kit.
That company got acquired and then went through a weird route, but basically it's still going as a major UK ISP. I'll keep the name private to protect the guilty. :)
2000 subscribers, and one modem rack to that and a business still operating 27 years later. A lot of sausage rolls, plenty of sticking plasters for the cuts from those shitty cases, and almost every day ending with a couple of pints in a pub somewhere.
One of my old colleagues and I often think back to that being one of the best years of work in our lives. But... data centre work is horrid, dirty, hot, and underpaid for what it is. But you can - sometimes - be part of something kind of cool and fun, and something very few people get to see or understand.
But there's a reason I've stuck to software ever since. :)
Are you me? would always take me about 10 attempts to even get one where all the pins would light up on a tester. But not good enough for high-speed data.
Kids these days, don't know when they were born. They have push-through RJ45 now, piece of piss and you never have one shorter than the other.
I don't miss on-site/DC infrastructure anymore. No more having to squeeze into tiny spaces, balance a lot of expensive kit on your head, and blood donations to the server gods.
Compute is so ubiquitous now I only have like 2 nodes in my lab anyway
For example our office is heated using heatpump that has >22C of water heated by equipment as a source.
https://delska.com/about/news-resources/delska-newsroom/pres...
DC would be the kind of place with a lot of government contractors that would have this kind of stipulation, is my guess.