HP ProLiant DL360 G6 Teardown and Maintenance -- The Electronics Inside 58

Just some personal insight into the hardware you are using.

Proliants were used extensively in Microsoft Mediaroom streaming television. I worked for an ISP that provided television to 160K subscribers using Mediaroom. A server farm to ingest, encrypt and distribute the content could exceed 200 servers. 1U's and 4U's server sizes were typically along with numerous storage arrays similar to the unit you showed.

If being used to stream video content is any indication of its performance your choice to use it for rendering has some merit.

The beasts are noisy! You would typically leave a server room to carry on a conversation. I had one in a lab in my basement. I gave it up or turned it off when not in use because of the fan noise.

Heating and cooling for our operation were done via Infinite Access (IA) flooring. The floor was sealed except under the racks. Cool air was pumped under the floor space, typically 18inches of free space and exited the top of the rack. All cables came up from under the floor.

Anchors rods would be secured from the rack into the flooring below. Pulling a few servers out of the rack could cause it to come crashing down on you if it wasn't anchored to the floor.

Most monitoring of the servers was performed using SNMP protocol. Vendors invest heavily in using SNMP MIBs to get information from the server to a monitoring host. To get the most out of monitoring using the vendor MIbs was critical.

I have personally hot-swapped both power supplies and hard drives without an outage. As you are changing a drive thinking, is this going to take out a channel on the guide was a little unnerving.

Maintenace was done between the hours of 01:00-06:00 to prevent interruptions other than the customers watching porn:)

Thanks for a trip down memory lane. At my age, everything is from memory lane.

I didn't realise I had some photos from 2015!

Stop it, I'm getting all teary eye'd. My wife had other ideas when I suggested a rack for my computer room. All I managed to keep was the 5ft log power bars for the work bench.

It does bring back memories.  We were a small remote engineering design office and we maintained our own servers.  When we did an upgrade to standardize the hardware I took home one of the old racks.  Of course, it was 7 foot tall with power strip, cable trays, and fans - so I had to disassemble it and reassemble it in my computer room over the objections of my wife.

I have fond memories of the automated sensor calling me in the middle of the night because the server room was overheating.  When we had power outages it would knock out our AC, but our UPS backup would keep the servers alive to protect overnight runs.  So, it was a judgment call to shutdown.

It does bring back memories.  We were a small remote engineering design office and we maintained our own servers.  When we did an upgrade to standardize the hardware I took home one of the old racks.  Of course, it was 7 foot tall with power strip, cable trays, and fans - so I had to disassemble it and reassemble it in my computer room over the objections of my wife.

I have fond memories of the automated sensor calling me in the middle of the night because the server room was overheating.  When we had power outages it would knock out our AC, but our UPS backup would keep the servers alive to protect overnight runs.  So, it was a judgment call to shutdown.

That's a tough call to make. And I have never heard of anyone saying thank you for risking keeping it up, or thank you for being safe and shutting down eaither....