Monday October 16, 2006

Ten Gees and eight Panthers

Last weekend we took the opportunity of a power down in our building to install one of these. It is also known as an Aspen switch. It has lots of new features and it was time to retire our old Black Diamond core switch after many years of faithful service. The sorts of things we will be doing with the new switch are ten gigabit networking and IPV6 routing etc.

Although the building was being powered down our production servers had to stay up as we need the information on them twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. We have a UPS/Diesel GenSet to accomplish this. So the first job was to have setup a temporary network to plug all the servers into. This project is a bit like doing a heart transplant. The most difficult bit was to then remove the old core switch and install the new one - both big and heavy. The new switch had already been setup with its vlans and other configuration information beforehand. Once bolted in and checked out we then transferred our servers back onto it. Of course having all the cables labelled was essential to this task...

The next stage will be to install 10G cards in our servers where we are sure the throughput is needed. For instance the links between our SunRay servers and the NFS server, also the NFS server with the source on it and the build boxes. AS we plan to change the two main NFS servers soon this will be easy to do.

Also on that day we installed the latest CPU's for the mid and high end servers. Inside Sun these are known as Panther cpu's. These CPU's have initially been installed in the SunRay servers running Solaris next , Nevada. One board of these speedy CPU's is enough for each of these machines with 64GB of memory on each board. These 1.8ghz CPU's have already won a lot of benchmarks against our competitors. As both of these servers were going to be physically powered off we popped in a ten 10G card in each ready to be enabled when each server takes their turn to get a new version Solaris next

For me my presence was only needed to help do the manual labour and provide drinks when people needed them. Two of this years students and our contractor were able to get some excellent experience helping us do this work. We have some post install work to do. The new core switch has many more one gigabit uplinks so we can now directly attach our edge switches to it rather than go via Summit 1i's. This will make our network simpler to manage and faster we reckon.