117174-consolidating-server-rack-space

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Speaking out of personal experience, consolidating server racks is a tedious process simply from how these servers are wired up. The biggest time constrain usually goes to cabling. These cables are long.....and usually cover places that are extremely hard to reach. The image below depicts how cabling often goes in datacenters: good cabling:

bad cabling:

So you spend a lot of time just figuring out what is connected to what. After removing servers from the rack, you often have to redo a lot of cabling or you may end up with back network segments. Also even if you completely redo the cabling and hardware movement, your routers and servers need a bit of time to rebuild the entire Network map to get traffic flowing again. Firewall entries have to be cleaned and stuff has to be cleaned. As for people at the Datacenter, this depends on the contract they have. It can be a service contract where the people working at the datacenter do all the work, or they have actuall access to the boxes and Carbine does the work themselves.


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Looks like Olivar is also a Chua irl :D. Notice how the cabling on the right looks like a tree? :ph34r:


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If I understand the announcement correctly this consolidation is for all of NCSoft West's server operations and not just Wildstar. Shops will often replace older hardware after it's been fully depreciated or when the node hardware fails. They then get to take advantage of the five or so years of tech advances which allow them to handle more load in the same space. If you have a stable population or your current capacity exceeds growth estimates by enough of a margin, you don't need as much hardware and as explained before, retiring excess capacity can be a large savings on expenses.


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