After approximately 10 years of using the same equipment naming convention at work we're thinking about changing, I'm curious what other people have used. [more inside]
posted by togdon on Nov 17, 2009 - 8 answers

Is there a more elegant, grammatical or pedantic way to say "datacentre"? Both words have Latin origins, but there seems to be something clumsy about that combination. Should it be a datumcentre? One word, two words or hyphenated?
posted by TheophileEscargot on May 28, 2009 - 28 answers

What tools and equipment do your carry with you to the datacenter / colo when it's time to work on your servers? [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar on Apr 17, 2009 - 13 answers

Is there a list of datacenter projects that have been built from a green-field state to take advantage of a guaranteed low per kilowatt-hour electrical rate? In particular I'm thinking of the big Google facility near The Dalles, Oregon and the Microsoft datacenter in a small eastern Washington town. Both were built in areas with excess capacity originally intended to serve large Aluminum smelters. [more inside]
posted by thewalrus on Mar 5, 2009 - 5 answers

How does Google run their data centers? I remember watching a Q&A with someone at Google trying to recruit kids at a college. One of them asked what kind of hardware they run on, he responded that they buy commodity rack servers off rackservers.com (I forget the exact generic domain he gave). Does this mean they use cheap rack servers with direct-attached storage? How does this work? [more inside]
posted by geoff. on Jan 27, 2009 - 21 answers

Looking for a good KVM-over-IP solution, specifically one that allows me to use a standard RDP client for access to hosts rather than a proprietary solution. [more inside]
posted by larsks on Oct 6, 2008 - 5 answers

Network admin / geek question: I'm in the process of building a small cluster of servers for my quickly growing wallpaper website, but I've never charted those waters before. I found a nice article on TorrentFreak about Mininova's server setup, and found it quite intriguing. My question is, are there any other big-ish sites like Mininova that are open about their hardware infrastructure? Googling around yielded few results. I'd be interested to see the setup for a site like Digg, MeFi, or Flickr. Thanks in advance. [more inside]
posted by hmaugans on Feb 16, 2008 - 5 answers

I have 9 HP LP1000r servers just sitting around and would like to put them to good use. Load balancing, render farm, folding@home, other suggestions? Details of our mini datacenter inside... [more inside]
posted by hummercash on Feb 11, 2008 - 8 answers

How can I do a multiple datacenter failover / load balance and have a shared filesystem available in both locations? [more inside]
posted by dirtylittlemonkey on Jul 25, 2007 - 9 answers