A DAY in the LIFE of the DATA CENTRE — FULL CUSTOMER "RACK & STACK" with ASH & JAMES!

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: What's going on guys welcome back to Custodian and another day in the life of a NOC engineer. We're gonna be doing a full rack and stack seeing as we got a lot of interest and a lot of good feedback from our how to properly rack server video so I'm gonna go this way if you want to follow me we're gonna go see James is currently setting up we've got a load of servers to install for a customer so he's currently prepping all of that getting all the rounds ready and stuff we do some maintenance work going on here some servicing of our fire systems so you may hear some beeping we're gonna go off and find James okay so here we are and I've found James so this is one of our unfinished I'll say unfinished our unracked pods so we've got various we got 12 pods in data floor 4 and they scale from 18 racks on the top floor to 22 I believe on the ground floor the customer is actually in the pod next door so we're going to use this space to get everything ready once we've done that we're then going to move the rails in get all the rails put in then we'll move the servers in switches and then we'll get cabling so we're gonna well I think James has pretty much got it all under control so I'm gonna go and have a cup of tea while he does that okay so here we are ready to take the rails in I've got my gloves my boots and my ear protection purely because I need it they're health and safety reasons I don't want to go deaf I don't want to cut my hands up on the rails because they're sharp metal objects and if they fall on my feet I'll know about it so wear my steel toe cap so I'm going to take these next door James is going to just finish off doing the stuff with the servers getting them ready and then we'll yeah we'll get started I'll just pop those bad boys there right I suppose I should get the blanking out of the rack because it's going to be hard to install the server otherwise so in order to make things a little bit easier I'm even going to take the door off just because it kind of swings and it might get my way so let's just lift take the roof out in the process I'm just going to put that over it go find James okay so now we're going to get the rails mounted James has gone around the back we've got three 3U's the rest are two U's so we're just going to work to that so we'll get these mounted why though why well the front ones will have to [00:02:48] Speaker 2: do the screw driver undo all this no the front one could come forward a bit all right well that won't take a bit okay so what's happened is we found that the rail is a little bit longer for how the rack is currently bolted so what we're going to have to do is undo the bolts on the rack physically move the mounting bars I suppose you could call it so these bits here forwards and backwards and so the rails actually fit inside the rack itself [00:03:19] Speaker 1: so what we're going to do is we're going to go get the server that's going in here just to make sure that a we put the rails in the right place and b that the rails are functioning correctly so what we'll probably do get one in put it in and then we'll just put the rest of rails in then all the service so now we're going to carry on putting the rails in and then we'll just do do that over and over and over again okay so we've finished putting all the rails in now hopefully you're listening it by lovely time maps we're going to go get the service we're going to slide them all in and then we're going to mount the network switches and look at the cabling so we've got to go get the servers we're going to go get the servers we're going to slide them all in and then we're going to mount the network switches and look at the cable so we'll be back in a second we should have loaded the three you lost [00:04:40] Speaker 2: right so what we're going to do now is we're going to mount the switches that customer has given us in the back of the rack this is their design so we're going to mount the switches that customer has given us in the back of the rack this is their design and so they've requested them for them to be in the back so the cables just stay in the back rather than going back to front so what we're going to do now is mount the cage nuts and then we'll get the switches and mount them physically in the rack yep so what we've done now is we've placed the cage nuts into the rack ash is just going to go and get the switches themselves and then we'll screw them into the rack after that we're going to cable up all the servers as per their design and that's just where we're at okay Ash if you stick it in the bottom one then wow I'll do the bottom screws and then you can let go [00:05:58] Speaker 1: it's got the bottom alright so now we're done the servers the next thing to do is get the cable in here so we're going to go get the boxes of cat5 get all the boots the plugs and the crimp tools and then we'll be back in here to cable it all up now [00:06:14] Speaker 2: yeah see you in a sec so the plan is to cut all the lengths to the longest length possible to the bottom server from the top so we'll take one length of cable plug it in and then that will be our measure and then we'll cut all of the other lengths to that length and then we'll just slowly chop them up as they go to each server so they're all the correct length there's no slack sitting anywhere in the rack yeah there's not much else to it really apart from making sure we write on them as to which port goes where so at the moment I'm just putting a load of boots on the end pull the boots on strip them all back and I can untwist them put the plugs on plug them into a switch we can run them down [00:07:08] Speaker 1: get measured out for length cut them put the other end on and if you guys want to learn how to do this bit for work or for at home we'll put a link in description or maybe a card in one of these corners we've actually done a how to on crimping cat5 and yeah it's been tried and tested over our ten ten years of operation well eleven years of operation I believe um and it keeps customers online [00:07:53] Speaker 2: that's a good thing okay okay so me and Ash have made all the ends off on one side of the cables we've marked them up with a little sharpie so we know what's what so both ends are marked with numbers and then we'll plug them into the correct numbers on the ports and loom them in and then we'll feed off each cable to each server with the correct numbers again right so you'll notice that I'm actually going to take it down this side of the tray however we have also got power cables to go in as well now the reason for me taking it down this side of the tray with probably the power cables as well is there are some fibre cables to go in so although we were not going to show that because I don't have the cars and fibres yet we like to keep those separate it means that if you've got a random engineer pulling on a piece of copper it also means they're not pulling on fibre as well you don't want to bend a fibre accidentally so it just helps random people from not bending things incorrectly and then there are also some new space PDUs to go in as well rather than our zero U ones that we normally supply in the rack so we've got more space for the tray this time so I have this cool tool it's called a cable comb it's a US painted tool I had to order it from the US and they're actually quite hard to get hold of but it does make life easier when doing this kind of looming you can do it by hand and there are some really clever people out that have done it by hand and they do it all the time and it looks fantastic but if you're like me and you haven't got any time one of these is great and then we're going to do it by hand [00:09:54] Speaker ?: and then we're going to do it by hand [00:09:55] Speaker 1: and then we're going to do it by hand [00:09:56] Speaker ?: and then we're going to do it by hand and then we're going to do it by hand and then we're going to do it by hand and then we're going to do it by hand and then we're going to do it by hand and then we're going to do it by hand [00:10:02] Speaker 1: and then we're going to do it by hand and then we're going to do it by hand [00:10:04] Speaker ?: and then we're going to do it by hand and then we're going to do it by hand [00:10:06] Speaker 2: and then we're going to do it by hand and then we're going to do it by hand and then we're going to do it by hand and then we're going to do it by hand [00:10:10] Speaker ?: and then we're going to do it by hand [00:10:11] Speaker 2: so now I've finished looming the cables with the Velcro we're going to tie them into the tray this time and reorganize the cables at the top so they come off at a nice angle on the switches and then we'll start tying them into the servers one by one now that's tied into the rack next thing for us to do is to actually pull out each cable one by one and plug it into the server and properly crimp them so we'll do that one by one to keep the looms intact so that's the next job [00:11:38] Speaker 1: okay so as you can see we've now done all the cabling everything is now nice and neat ready to go ready for the customer to bring their PDUs in and get everything set up, powered on and ready to go I'm just sorting out all these off cuts because we're going to make them up to sell them to customers because we don't like waste so yeah we're going to go ahead and do this we'll probably put some b-roll of the cable porn and yeah we'll see you in the next video and remember to subscribe guys see you next time