OUCS Data Centre Clean-Up

This is just a minor post about our day to day background operations.

Our team is currently making efforts to clear up our equipment and locations, spurred on by

  • Having a new data centre manger
  • Having IT support staff inductions always include a tour of the OUCS data centre
  • Wanting to clear up years of accumulated clutter
  • Adhering to the commitment to greener computing
  • Ensuring that in an emergency the data, labelling and servers are accessible

To reduce power consumption and physical presence the majority of our development hosts were disposed of and instead setup on a simple virtual machine. Development servers were traditionally hosted on out of warranty hardware before this.

We’ve moved remaining non rack based equipment to a new location to facilitate the data centre manager’s plans to restructure the room for better air conditioning flow.

An audit of the data centre’s primary patch cabinet is underway, with cable labels being added, checked and updated as needed as well as defunct cabling being removed.

As a team, Networks and Network Control (who cover the more physical side of networking) already had a cabling colour standard however it wasn’t widely published to other teams so we’re aiming to correct this. We’ve updated the OUCS internal wiki to include the details and are hoping to put a small poster with the details on each cabinet we own, where it will be visible to others.

While disposing of our old development machines we also prompted other groups in OUCS to use the opportunity to dispose of their old hosts. In the end a massive pile of ancient machines was built in the data centre from old servers hidden under shelving and desk units in the area. The pile grew large enough that it became intrusive to operations in the room and it was a big relief when collected!

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