coolers have arrived

The in-row coolers and the end-row racks have arrived.

It's really kind of nuts. The big, empty racks you see there will be at both ends of the hot-aisles, which will be fully contained with plexiglass. That's fully contained hot-aisles, man! Talk about air circulation. We are putting our huge 48-disk pci-x disk arrays in these apc racks (24 terabytes in each 4-U box, and there will be 72 of these buggers - crazy!)

These nice, hardhatted fellows are putting the in-row cooling units in place (although it looks like they're putting the second row in the wrong place, as that will be the cold aisle where they are currently standing). The in-row coolers will be liquid-cooled air handlers that will help circulate all the intense heat from the 48 node/chassis racks, while cooling it at the same time.

I had the pleasure of hearing one of those disk-system boxes. It's loud as hell, easily 50 decibels. When just the 72 boxes of disks are turned on, your ears will easily be damaged. With the pdus, the nodes themselves, the disks, the major 40-ton air handlers and the in-row coolers are all running concurrently, it will easily be louder than airplanes at the threshhold of human hearing destruction. SWEET.