Desecrating the Datacenter

This morning as I was making one of my many sojourns to the water dispenser, I caught a glimpse of our office communications equipment - router and switches - ignominiously stacked in a corner beside the pantry cabinets.

I can see that the equipments are running live, humming and panting hot-air, cables running riot like spaghetti in that forgotten corner of our office. That miserable-looking jumble of chassis and cables is in actual fact our lifeline and nervous system - the office LAN and the all-important connection to the Internet .

Because ours is still a very small office with about 50 people, there is no fulltime IT department or systems administrator to manage our internal IT needs. As offices grow bigger, usually a "computer room" with proper air-conditioning is designated for servers and communications equipments. And as companies grow even bigger and IT becomes a mission-critical part of their businesses, they will have to have their own proper datacenter (or an outsourced one, as is the trend these days).

I have spent a great portion of my IT career helping customers to architect and build datacenters. Datacenters are inhospitable places for human beings: its air-conditioning and humidity is controlled such that machines would hum along happily but not us. Within datacenters, the racks and stacks are altars to the server gods and are to be tended lovingly by us, the human beings.

Datacenters remind me of the Tabernacle of the biblical Jews - a tent-like structure where they kept their Holiest of Holies, The Ark of the Covenant. Through their wanderings in the desert the Jews carried the Tabernacle with them but only their very highest priests are allowed access into it. They are the ones who could tend to their holiest object. Datacenters should be like that.

I often advise my customers to treat the datacenter as sacred. No unauthorized person should enter a datacenter and entry should only be for reasons deemed absolutely necessary. No applications are to be installed in the datacenter unless they have gone through a rigorous production acceptance process. And once inside, everything should be controlled and monitored. How could one guarantee security and uptime if one allows his datacenter to be treated like a hacker's lab?

Whenever I get the opportunity I would always request to tour my customer's datacenter. I enjoy doing it because it is often very revealing about the company itself: The way cables are managed, the way the equipments are stacked in racks, and the way everything is labelled all leaves forensic evidence that reveals the mindset and the attitude of the people running the organization.

During the dot-com boom, I had the opportunity to visit many hosting datacenters throughout the world in the course of my work: names like Exodus (now acquired by Cable & Wireless) and Global Crossing (being acquired by ST Telemedia and Hutchinson Telecommunications) - the Internet datacenters which hosted so many of the high-flying dotcoms. Sadly most of them filed for Chapter 11 after the dot-com crash.

During their heydays these operations were models of datacenter perfection - the biometrics security, the endless array of racks and cages and the impressive lights-out management. One could see thousands of servers: electronic sentinels with lights blinking quietly in their racks, each holding a cyberworld of its own. Witnessing it is like the Chosen One finally seeing the Matrix for what it really is - rivulets of green blinking code.

The datacenter is the engine-room, the brain and the memory banks of an enteprise. The datacenter is an enterprise's Holiest of Holies. Sadly I still see many of my customers treating their datacenters in a cavalier manner. Often they use it like an extra storeroom for their broken equipment, old manuals and empty boxes. To me, it is an unpardonable act of desecration.