Houston DC Update 1

July 13, 2011

I’ve gotten some of the site done…which means I have to head back to H-town next week to finish. Here are a few pics of the work done.

I'm using the unifi's for our wireless distribution. These will really fit in with the clean aesthetic we have going…and they are cool and I want to try them…hehe

Piles of stuff.

Preterminated copper. We have a bundle of 48 cat6 cables all staggered specially for instillation into our switches and patchpanels. Each pair of successive cables is slightly longer. This allows for anyone to run the cables in little time. All you have to do past that point is simply plug everything together.

Some preterm 24 strand fiber…tested and ready to go 🙂

400' spool of 144 count preterm single mode fiber…can I get an A-men?

As you can see, this is THICK. Also, note the pull sock. They double wrap the connectors, then put this stress releaving pull sock. Oh so convenient.

My double stack of Cisco 7609s with dual sup720 3BXLs. Yes, those are 10gig line cards you see in there.

3560Es with 10gig X2 optics.

These are our zone boxes. They will hold a 48 port patch panel and also a 1U LIU for fiber terminations. They sit directly under a suspended floor tile so that you don't loose any floor space and can patch equipment at remote locations.

Here's the box mounted…I'd have to say it isn't going to move.

Side view of it mounted.

A peek of it open.

I built the mount out of 14 gauge unistrut. I then used U bolts to secure it to the stantions and then to itself. Last, I used some smaller U bolts to secure the zone box to the unistrut. Two boxes used 2 10' sections of 14 gauge unistrut. I also used 16 1"1/2 and 4 3/4" U bolts.

This is the cross connect cabinet. The only thing left is to install the copper patch panels. You can see the 4 LIUs mounted in the top and the two 3560Es mounted in the bottom.

In this DC you can see that we do a LOT of prepatching. The idea is that just about anyone can plug in the patch cables to get connectivity for the customers. All of the connectivity is 10gig between our equipment. Even with all of this heavy Cisco, I’m still going to run the hotspot via Mikrotik 😉

I’ll have more up next week…as we progress.

Comments

5 responses to “Houston DC Update 1”

July 14, 2011

Justin Wilson

10 Gig goodness!
July 14, 2011

Greg

😉
July 15, 2011

Andrew Thrift

Very nice Greg,

Always good to see what other people are doing with their data centres.
July 15, 2011

Tim Payne

Just out of curiosity, who would construct a datacenter like this? For their own use? For their own use and other customers? What kind of outside feeds would come into it to make it practical, I’m mean you have 10g internal…my intuition says a lot of data moving around to store and you haven’t pointed out the SAN area yet. 🙂 🙂

Inquiring minds want to know.. 🙂

If you can say that is.. 🙂

-tp
July 15, 2011

Greg

@Andrew
I’m not really sure what others are doing…I know what our customers need and that’s how I design my infrastructure.

@Tim
Anyone with a substantial foot print would construct their facility like this. We are a colo facility rather than a hosting company. We provide power, cooling and connectivity…the customer does the rest. They bring in their own equipment, hook it up and turn it on. We make sure that it stays on and connected.
We have high throughput links because we act as an ISP with multiple up stream carriers. We have to scale all the way up to 10Gb. Since we are just turning this location up we start with just a couple of gigs, but can quickly scale as needed…pretty standard.
Also, since the price on 10gig is really dropping, there is little reason not to use it.

Houston DC Update 1

Comments

5 responses to “Houston DC Update 1”

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