Datacenters For Ravers

This past month I’ve been building a new infrastructure for iSkoot, a great mobile start-up. We’ve been tasked with re-building and migrating an existing infrastructure from an east coast datacenter to Santa Clara in 25 days. The project itself is going pretty smoothly, minus a few miss-communications between our ISP (Internap) and the datacenter that they resell space from. Utilizing AutoYast, Puppet, and my caffeine addiction we’re going to beat our deadlines. All in all the project has been fun, but the best part has been the datacenter. This particular datacenter company’s founder obtained his degree in video production before becoming a technologist. Hijinx ensues when an artist from LA builds datacenters in the silicon valley. An example of his flair for the dramatic is their interior lighting system. To save power, motion sensors turn on overhead fluorescent lights when you get into your cage. The rest of the time you’re being guided through the dimly-lit aisles through pretty high intensity blue LEDs. This lighting scheme makes for some spectacular photo ops. Originally, I thought that this was silly. Then Steve Rubin from Layer42 explained to me that it’s a six-figure yearly proposition just to make the transformers hum and run the lighting 24/7 in a 12k square foot datacenter.