Category: Hardware

AOL Wins Green IT Award from Uptime Institute

It was great to be up in NYC last Wednesday representing AOL.  The Uptime Institute awarded AOL its Green IT Award for “Data Center Energy Efficiency Improvement: IT“.

Great work by Brad Allison in creating SUMO and for the data center and SA teams for pushing its usage.  This tool allows AOL to identify underutilized servers and either decommission them – or bundle them up onto virtualized hosts.

It is great to work with dedicated people that are not only smart, but care about their environment at the same time.

Ted Cahall

Employee Purchase Program – more servers

I recently ordered and received a couple more servers from the AOL Employee Purchase Program.  They are a couple of Dell 2850s with 4GB of RAM.  I also picked up a nice Dell desktop for $100 as well.  Can never have enough of those.  I grabbed some speakers for $5 to hook up to one of my Apple AirPort Express units to allow music in a remote room through iTunes.

Onto installing CentOS on the servers and Windows on the PC.  This should complete my home data center.  I am really racking up a power bill.

Ted Cahall

Home Data Center “Drudgery”

Managing my home data center takes more time lately. I now have a mac mini and a Fedora Core 3 box in my office.  This is in addition to the servers in my garage.

I enjoy the Fedora Core 3 box and am looking to upgrade an older AS2.1 box to Fedora.  First I need to  move the old applications off of it. I am keeping notes in a Wiki on one of my machines now to track all the stuff I am doing to these boxes. At least I have MRTG graphs for my PIX and my NICs on all the machines in the garage. I also have RRD graphs for all of the web servers on those machines as well.

Connecting my DSL and Cable Modem Networks

I plan on buying a PIX for the upstairs office.  This way I can make a site-to-site VPN that auto connects between the upstairs cable modem and the garage’s DSL line. Then I will instrument the upstairs machines with MRTG and RRD as well.

Maybe I will start my Harley some time in May. It has been so long the battery may be dead by now. 🙁 It is overcast and cold this morning up here in the hills – so no ride today.