Thoughts on working inside a data center suite

submited by

Style Pass

2024-09-25 11:30:06

I have a few more thoughts on the whole topic of colocation. First of all, Joel wrote in with a couple of tips beyond the basic "screwdriver and flashlight" that I mentioned. He says you should bring hearing protection, a step-stool or small ladder, and a jacket if you get cold. I like this thinking, and figured I'd expand on this for the benefit of those wondering what this all means.

First up, these places are LOUD. Everything you can imagine has fans on it. Obviously there are massive air handlers in the suites, but the (proper server class) computers and switches and everything else are also rocking a ton of fans. Some of them throttle back when the CPU load isn't too high, but a fair number of these things actually have rather high CPU load and so they never throttle back.

I mean, it's 2024, and people are writing CPU-bound computational stuff in languages that are interpreted, single-threaded, and slow as shit. OF COURSE they're running their CPUs as hard as they possibly can. But I digress.