We see data centres as pretty sterile places, with flashy lights and expensive IT equipment. It’s therefore quite important that the place is kept tidy and clean.
Yesterday we had our Reynolds House data centre facility professionally cleaned by CRM Services. This is obviously essential for any well-run data centre, as various visitors and contractors can leave an impressive trail of debris and dirt in their wake. During this professional clean all surfaces (outside the cabinets) were vacuumed and dusted, the floor was also ’stripped’ with a Numatic Rotary Floor Machine and finished with a coat of anti static (non-slip) polish. The sub-floor environment was also given a thoroughly good going over.
All this got me to thinking about how important cleanliness is in a wider sense, in terms of our ability to deliver reliable services to our customers. Cleanliness and tidiness is something that’s deeply ingrained into our modus operandi at Melbourne. This is particularly important when you’re looking after complex technical infrastructure.
In my ten years in the hosting industry, I’ve seen some pretty appalling data centres, where I’ve wondered how they manage to keep any services live at all! As a company, we’ve learnt techniques over the years to improve the layout of our cabinets, to ensure that cabling is kept neat, tidy and identifiable.
When we opened our new Turing House data centre facility earlier this year, we put in place all we’d learnt about how best to lay out the place, organise cabling, and keep the place generally neat, tidy, and safe to work in. After all, the last thing you want is an outage because someone tripped over a trailing patch cable. And we don’t just keep our data centres and cabinets tidy to avoid tripping hazards; poorly organised cabinets can also be a cause for overheating.
We run cables (both power and network) in a structured manner to allow all expelled hot air from servers an open path into the hot aisles. As a result, air-flow is improved and the air-conditioning units don’t have to work as hard to keep the data centre at a nice, cool temperature. This simple, yet cost effective practice contributes towards our constant aim to keep our prices very competitive!
For those of you who are interested (or have already made requests!), please see below for pictures of our newly cleaned data centre. We’ll take some pictures of our uber-tidy cabinets too and post them soon!
Daniel Keighron-Foster, Technical Director
