Most of my blog posts are long and text-heavy. This one is short on text and mostly photos…
Over the course of my career, I’ve been in a lot of different data centers. Some have been in interesting places, strange places, and some under frighteningly high levels of security. I’ve installed, fixed, and administered compute, network, and storage gear in a lot of places.
Most of the building is a giant open floor, complete with an overhead crane rated for 25 tons. There’s only a tiny portion of the building that has a second floor, so there’s no elevator. Oh, and the data center is upstairs…
So, our challenge was to get all that storage equipment upstairs.
At first, I thought we’d be carrying things up the stairs one box at a time, but it turns out we had another solution. First we had to prepare the upstairs…
OK, the railing was no longer in the way, but how were we going to get the Isilon 15 feet up? With a forklift, what else?
The next three pictures tell the story better than I could write it.
Why post this? Two reasons: