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A comment on When It Comes to Facebook Scale, You Can Throw Out the Rulebook. Parent comment

Re:When It Comes to Facebook Scale, You Can Throw Out the Ru... by delluminatus on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @01:28PM (#8362786)
This comment reminds me of my time as a sysadmin in college. I had to rack a lot of 1U and 2U servers (the Dells of yesteryear referred to) and they are EXTREMELY heavy. Racking them was tricky because you had to put together the rack mount yourself and then get it all lined up while you're holding this 100+ lb thing (which is awkwardly too long and wide to handle easily) at chest height and sliding it into the rails in the cabinet.

One day they let me take a decommissioned PowerEdge server back to my dorm room. It was old, but it still had something like 16 cores, 64 GB RAM, and 2 hard drives. As a college student with no money I thought this was pretty cool. Carrying that thing five blocks to my dorm room was one of the hardest damn things I've ever done, and in the end it was too loud to use.

Moral of the story: Rack-mount servers are not designed to coexist with humans.

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Re:When It Comes to Facebook Scale, You Can Throw Out the Ru... by judgardner on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @02:16PM (#8363121)
Server lifts are pretty common kit in most colocations.

http://www.material-lifts.com/client_images/catalog19960/pag...

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Re:When It Comes to Facebook Scale, You Can Throw Out the Ru... by peterwwillis on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @03:01PM (#8363431)
Barring those (and the space to fit it between the racks), you could attach tracks on the ceiling and use a moving chain & pulley to move them around with just one person. Granted, with double racks you'd still need a ladder to attach the chain.
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