And this is why we co-locate in Globalswitch, a top-tier facility with floors that AREN’T MADE OF BALSA WOOD.

Racks are pretty heavy, sure, but they totally wtfpwned those tables there

Part A

Use a fresh answer book for this part. Show all working-out with your answers. Approved graphing calculators may be used.

It is 4am on a Friday morning and Eirin has been woken by an SMS from the emergency support line. A colocation customer’s server is offline, and she needs to visit the datacentre. Due to sleep-deprivation and/or ethanol intoxication, Eirin is unable to find the lightswitch, but needs to throw on some clothes and get there ASAP.

Her wardrobe contains three skirts {black,black,red}, four tops {purple,blue,black,black} and two pairs of comfortable shoes {black heels,black sneakers}. Each piece of clothing is chosen at random.

1. How many distinct outfits does Eirin have available?
2. What is the probability that Eirin will have a coordinated outfit?
3. How much easier is it to just pick up whatever’s lying on the floor from last night?
4. Will it be faster for her to put her hair in a single french braid, or twintails?
5. What is the probability that the colocation customer has done something totally silly, like changing their firewall configuration and subsequently looking themselves out in the process?
6. How much will Anchor charge the customer for this out-of-hours callout?

Our new colocation space will be ready to go very soon! In the last couple of days we’ve had the new racks installed and the basic network infrastructure connected. The power rails in each rack will be powered up on Friday, and the network hardware will be installed. We expect to have live equipment in there in less than a week.

This will mostly be a photo post, they speak for themselves. To keep things interesting we’ve got photos of some of the high-level building infrastructure. This is the heavy-duty, redundancy-everywhere stuff that keeps you up and running, guaranteed. If you’re interested, follow the link on each photo; there’s a little more detail on what you’re looking at.

You can see most of the new floorspace and racks in the photos there. Once it’s online, we’ll have doubled our entire operating capacity. I’d say we’re growing rather nicely.

Photos are Creative Commons licensed

Anchor’s colocation requirements have been growing steadily over the past few years, so we’ve recently taken the plunge to significantly increase our total datacentre floor space which will allow for many new racks. At this point we’re in the early stages of fitting out the suite, so we thought it an ideal chance to give our readers some insight into the process of fitting out a data centre.

A long view of the new Anchor suite area

The plan is to produce a new blog post for each step; and, of course, take plenty of pretty pictures along the way!

A handful of our new racks, some still in their wrapping

You can see above a few of the shiny new extra-wide racks that have already been delivered. The keen-eyed might also be able to see the tape marking the locations of the first few racks to be powered up shortly, with the under-floor power installation happening right now. The suite’s cage will be going in real soon now.

A long view from the opposite end of our new suite area

Redundant air-conditioning units

We’ll keep the blog updated as things progress, so check back soon for the next post!