Zit Seng's Superwall

With the push of this button, the air circuit breaker is switched off, and the disaster recovery (DR) drill is officially started. Yes, if you notice from the photo, the circuit breaker is huge. It is not like any common circuit breaker you find in your household electrical panel. This is a huge circuit breaker sized for 2500 amperes 3-phase current. It’s 415V, more than the typical 230V household power supply, but in the grander scheme of things, this is still considered “low tension”.

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Last weekend, zitseng.com and the rest of my servers were moved to a new data centre. The rental costs at the old place had sky-rocketed and it was not economical for us to stay with them anymore. This was responsible for some of the down time of this site, and partly the reason for the quietness or lack of posts recently.

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We’re starting to recruit student helpers again. They will help us with our network and data centre operations. This is like an internship, a program that we’ve run for one semester already. It is a really exciting opportunity for students as they will get hands-on learning experience working with production enterprise networks and data centres.

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A tiny hairline crack, but it still takes a significant effort to rectify it. Can you spot the crack? That tiny crack led to water leak which is a significant issue in a data centre. The problem erupted two weekends ago when our water leak detection system signaled an alarm. Initially, it looked like it might be a problem with condensation on the chill water pipe. However, after ripping away some insulation to track down the source of the water leak, the hairline crack was discovered.

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We’re still looking to hire more staff to support our Network, Data Centre and IT Security operations. It is the same super engineers kind of work I blogged previously, but this a technologist position targeted at polytechnic graduates. Our priority for this position is in Network, Data Centre and IT Security operations, in decreasing order. Let me know if you’re interested.

We witnessed the discharge of HFC227ea (FM200) fire suppression gas a few days ago! It was really a special and unique experience because few people ever get to witness the discharge of FM200 gas.

FM200 is a clean agent residue free fire suppression gas often used in data centres. FM200 gas, instead of water or other chemicals, is discharged into the room to extinguish a fire. The main advantages of FM200 is that it is safe to use around all types of electrical and electronics equipment, safe for humans, and leaves no residue after the gas has been discharged.

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Are you looking around for a new job? Or perhaps your first job? Well, we’re hiring! We’re recruiting to fill the vacancy of Systems Engineer (Network). You will work with our Network Team which manages overall Network operations, Data Centre operations and IT Security operations. (Yes, if it sounds like three jobs rolled into one, it is.)

What are the perks of this job? Well, you’ll get lots and lots of learning opportunities in a relaxed and friendly working environment. We do run state-of-the-art network infrastructure and data centre facilities, so it is not like you’re stuck with some yester-year’s technologies.

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Well, my fingers were itchy, and I wanted to test something out. Something that carried a small but inherent risk of mucking up. I was careful, no less, to make sure there would be no mistakes, no typos. In fact, I wrote a “rollback” script to undo the changes after a timed delay, just as a precaution. So, even if the changes mucked up the system, the changes would be automatically rolled back anyway. Then, how about testing this rollback script too? Ah, that’s where it screwed up. Something else was broken, and the rollback script got stuck, and it disconnected my server from the net.

And so in the dead of the night, I had to make a trip down to the colo data centre to fix my server. The security guard was delighted to have some company. I wasn’t. Well at least not in the wee hours of a Monday morning. He was in the mood to chat, and I tried my best to be polite.

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We have a data centre that recently became the first in South East Asia (or perhaps in Asia too) to operate a certain type of liquid cooled rack. Liquid cooling technology is actually not new; It was quite common maybe 2 decades ago. The large mainframe computers of that era produced so much heat that they needed to be cooled by chilled water or refrigerant. Liquid cooling has become less common since then. Nowadays, the thought of water in a data centre is unimaginable to many data centre operators. But today, the advent of very high density computing is beginning to re-introduce liquid cooling into data centres.

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[photopress:20071005535.jpg,thumb,pp_image]A computer science student saw this, and asked if it was a mainframe computer. I was almost going to burst out laughing, but managed to hold myself together. I’m sure most of you know it is not a computer at all. This 1.7m high contraption is an isolation transformer. At least you should be able to tell it is some kind of a transformer, right?

I just thought to myself that, my goodness, our students don’t even know how a mainframe computer looks like? Not even seen anything from photos or pictures? Mainframe computers are no doubt getting quite rare these days, so it is not surprising that few people have actually seen the real thing with their own eyes. But I’d imagine at least a computer science student would have some impression from pictures in books or on the Internet. (Check Google images for some impressions.) The last mainframe at my workplace, an IBM 3090, was decommissioned and removed before year 2000 (I think).

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