Tuesday, June 2, 2009

The god of storage hates me, I know it

It seems like storage and I never get along. There's always some difficulty somewhere. It's always that I don't have enough, or I don't have enough where I need it, and there's always the occasional sorry-we-sold-you-a-single-controller followed by I'll-overnight-you-another-one which appears to be concluded by sorry-it-won't-be-there-until-next-week. /sigh

So yes, looking back at my blog's RSS feed, it was Wednesday of last week that I discovered the problem was the lack of a 2nd storage controller, and it was that same day that we ordered another controller. We asked for it to be overnighted. Apparently overnight is 6 days later, because it should come today. I mean, theoretically, it might not, but hey, I'm an optimist. Really.

Assuming that it does come today, I'm driving to Philadelphia to install it into the chassis. If it doesn't come, I'm driving to Philadelphia to install another server into the rack, because we promised operations that they'd have a working environment by Wednesday, then I'm going again whenever the part comes.

In almost-offtopic news, I am quickly becoming a proponent of the "skip a rack unit between equipment" school of rack management. You see, there are people like me who shove all of the equipment together so that they can maintain a chunk of extra free space in the rack in case something big comes along. Then there are people who say that airflow and heat dissipation are no good when the servers are like that, so they leave one rack unit between their equipment.

I've got blades, so skipping a RU wouldn't do much for my heat dissipation, but my 2nd processor kit is coming with a 1u pair of battery backups for the storage array and I REALLY wish that I hadn't put the array on the bottom of the rack and left the nearest free space about 15 units above it. I'm going to have to do some rearranging, and I'm not sure what I can move yet.