Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

This Lonely Place at Pandan Loop

This lonely place in the middle of nowhere (actually an industrial area) houses a data centre. Not a very big facility. A long time ago, it was fun to visit data centres. But I run and manage data centres myself as part of my regular day work, so nowadays, data centres aren’t all that exciting anymore. Particularly when you have to go far out of your way to visit one to fix some silly IT problem in the middle of the night.

This data centre used to be spacious, with very effective air-conditioning. Nowadays, this facility is a little more congested, and more significantly, suffering from severe air-conditioning problems. It has become so inelegant as to need a bit circulating fan placed in the middle of the room to keep air “moving” (and I doubt it even helps that much).

I say this place is lonely and in the middle of nowhere because:

  1. I got lost trying to find the place. It’s not my first time there, but oh well, I haven’t been there in a long time, and it doesn’t help that the building is actually tucked away from the road, with only a miserable driveway flanked on both sides by developments with much larger frontages.
  2. I haven’t quite seen many other people in the building at all. In fact, I don’t even know who else are in the building.

Everyone seems to have trouble with cooling. I’m lucky that, at the moment, the two data centres I run are free from cooling problems (*touch wood*). They weren’t problem-free all the time though. Electricity may seem more fragile, but the main challenges have usually come from cooling.

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