This week the blog is six months old and today happens to be my
seventh anniversary working at Vibrant. To commemorate these
milestones, I offer up the following roundup post. Okay, I admit it.
This is actually just an excuse to put up a quick post while we work on
getting some solid blog posts rolling again.
I enjoy getting a look in at client’s datacenters and operations.
It’s almost always impressive to see a large corporations massive and
intricately organized server farm or warehouse system. Here are some
sneak peeks that have surfaced on the web recently:
AT&T’s Global Network Operations Center
- If I saw this in a big Hollywood movie, I would frankly think they were overdoing it.
Pixar’s Rendering Farm
- A row like this is common to see at an ISP, but when you consider these are all dedicated just to rendering, it’s pretty cool.
Motherboard Factory Tour (Gigabyte)
- PCStats.com has a very thorough tour of Gigabyte’s motherboard factory
in Nan-Ping, Taiwan which follows each step of the process with photos
galore. Our inventory guys will definitely have warehouse envy when they
see the automated pallet system on this page.
Elsewhere online, AP Lawrence, the always useful Unix resource site, has published one of our articles – Used Servers – Black, White or Gray Market?
Tony is a really helpful guy and writes smart articles there for his
readers. I was honored to be able to contribute to his community.
One last link out of Vegas. At this month’s CES, Hitachi just announced a 1TB Disk Drive.
While I’m sure many people will be worried about storing all of their
data on a drive of this size, I’m sure it will subside. As John C. Dvorak
noted on a recent TWIT podcast, there were once fears that 9GB drives
couldn’t be reliable since they were just too big. Now you can carry
9GB of data in your watch.