Server racks find themselves, like iMacs and remote control Christmas lights, at the geeky junction of technology and style. Or at least, they can do. Little else has the potential to both lift the spirits, or to sadden the heart like a server rack.

We’ve collected some of our favourite server rack / server room pictures for you.

The Good

A couple of our favourite, well-organised set-ups first.

In 2007, the London Stock Exchange reported they could handle 4,200 orders per second. This photo shows their test/dev server room. The photographer, JonnieW@lker says “The real thing has cameras on tripods and to get in you need 2 signed authorisations in order to gain access (only allowed after 6:00 pm)“

This rack, somewhere in California, gets our vote for its well tidied cables, and a bonus point for emitting just the right amount of blue glow. Good find, Kim Scarborough!

The Bad

Free Geek volunteers repurpose old computers for people that wouldn’t be able to afford them otherwise. Thanks to Skippy13, we can now see inside the FreeGeek server room. We’re going to have a whip-round and donate some cable-ties to them.

Richard explains that the configuration in this test lab changes on a daily basis, though it seems to remain in permanent Spaghetti Hell.  Concerningly, it seems that this photo was taken after the lab was cleaned up. Woah.

It looks like this used to be a server room. Maybe? To be fair, their looming and cable-tidying looked pretty top notch, but we can only imagine that there may have been heat dissipation issues. No hints from Silfverduk, except that it seems to be in Pripyat, Ukraine.

The Funky

A bonus server set-up to finish:

These are the servers for a web service called Backrub. The wiring clearly needs a bit of work, but we particularly like the SCSI drive box built from plastic bricks.

It’s great that the guys who bult it had time to enjoy themselves, whilst building up the service which would later be renamed ‘Google.’

If you find your server is living in Spaghetti Hell, you should talk to us about IT Support. We promise not to take incriminating photos!

The blogosphere was amazed earlier this year when it realised the true size of Google. Think Google is the King Kong of search? Think a million King Kongs and you’re getting close. Google processes 20 Petabytes of a data a day. Don’t know what a Petabyte is? Check this out:

An MP3 is about 3MB. The Beatles recorded 214 singles- that’s close to just one gigabyte. 1024 gigabytes makes a Terabyte and 1024 terabytes makes a petabyte. Lost and confused? We were too.

Our poor mortal minds haven’t been so boggled by the ‘big numbers’ since a legendary wag fooled his elders out of ‘quite a lot’ of rice by using a chess board a few hundred years ago. We’ve used the same unit of measurement – grains of rice – to try to put Google’s electronic brain power into perspective.

Let’s relate a grain of rice to a byte. A byte is normally eight binary bits, eg ‘10011000’. It can also be written as a two digit hexadecimal number. In terms of data, a byte is generally used to store a letter. One byte = one letter = one grain of rice.

Bearing this new representation in mind, we can now look at a kilobyte (1024 bytes) as a small bowl of rice. It’s about half a portion, not enough to fill you up – and in data terms a kilobyte would only be a few paragraphs of text – not much to mentally stimulate you there either.

Next up is the megabyte – which is around the size of all the text on an average website, or a short novel. On the rice scale, a megabyte would be a 25kilo bag of rice; enough to feed over 420 people in one sitting, if you have enough chairs.

1024 times larger still is the gigabyte. Back in 1995, I bought a PC with a gigabyte of hard drive space, and managed to store everything I needed on there for the next few years.

To store a gigabyte of rice I’d have needed a bigger garden…. the size of two shipping containers to be more precise. And I could have treated all of those curry-loving Mancunians to a meal. The equivalent of finding a single word in a gigabyte of text is finding a few grains of rice somewhere inside those two containers.

Moving up the scale again we reach the terabyte, equivalent to 1024 gigabytes. I have a terabyte drive sitting in front of me – it’s the size of a small shoebox. But to search through all that data – even on my most powerful desktop machine – would take longer than my patience could bear.

To transport a ‘terabyte’ of rice we’d need to hire this container ship. We could use its contents to feed everybody in the EU.

Finally, we arrive at the mighty petabyte. At this stage, we’re well beyond the size of data that most individuals or small companies handle, and into the realms of some of our Enterprise clients. It’s the same as 210 of the largest container ships that have ever been built, EIGHTY bowls of rice for every person on the planet, or…

…what you’d need to cover central London in 1 metre of rice!

Remember, Google processes 20 petabytes of data every day; or if you prefer – over 4,000 gigantic ships bursting with rice, 1,600 bowls for everyone on the planet, or central London drowned in 20 metres of the stuff. This is spread over 72,000 jobs each taking an average of 7 minutes to complete. Their data processing capability is a big contributor to their position at the top of the online world, and also no doubt to their estimated £1million monthly electricity bill.

If you have a data network – whether it’s projected to carry giga-, tera-, or petabytes – then drop us a line to find out how our IT Support services can help your business. We could even treat you to a bowl of rice.

Meet the gang: Wayne, Tracy, Maxine and Leslie. They all love the Internet and use it to (legally) download all types of files, particularly movies.

…Wayne’s a bit bored and really feels like watching a movie as soon as possible. This short video explains how BitTorrent can make it happen. It also touches on BitTorrent etiquette, to help you avoid any potential embarrassment and achieve the best possible download results (please don’t be a leech).

If, for some crazy reason, you don’t feel like watching the whole video, here’s what basically happens (WARNING: spoiler below): - Wayne (the client) feels like watching a movie.

• He sends a file request using BitTorrent software on his computer via the Internet to a Tracker

• The Tracker accepts the file request and then finds some other computers (peers) that have the file and are willing to share it.

• There always needs to be one computer with the whole file on it, but other computers can be downloading and uploading a torrent of bits in any order.

• Once the Tracker has linked up all these computers the file sharing begins in earnest, and it really is the more the merrier!

• So (deep breath): Maxine (who has 100% of the file) shares an F with Wayne, then Leslie shares an I, then Wayne sends an F back, then Tracy shares an E and Wayne shares an I with Tracy and an E with Leslie, then Maxine shares an L with Wayne (which means Wayne’s FILE is complete), finally he shares an L with Leslie.

Did you get all that? No? Well, that’s why we made a video…

For those that are interested, Howstuffworks has a much fuller description of how BitTorrent works

Music: Radio Martini - Kevin MacLeod

Welcome!

Managed Networks is an IT Support company based in London. We have offices around the UK including London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham

This blog was set up to give a light hearted look at Managed Networks and the IT Support Industry. Have a look around and check out the various videos we have posted.

Obviously, if you are unhappy with your current IT support setup, then we would love to hear from you.