Here we are in 2016. If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you might recall a post I threw together back in 2010 called Portrait of a Basement Datacenter. Back in 2010, I was living on the west side of Cincinnati with my wife (Tracy) and three year-old twins (Brendan and Sabrina). We were kind of shoehorned into that house; there just wasn’t a lot of room. Todd Klindt visited once and had dinner with us. He didn’t say it, but I’m sure he thought it: “gosh, there’s a lot of stuff in this little house.”
All of my computer equipment (or rather, nearly all of my computer equipment) was in the basement. I had what I called a “basement datacenter,” and it was quite a collection of PCs and servers in varying form factors and with a variety of capabilities.
The image on the right is how things looked in 2010. Just looking at the picture brings back a bunch of memories for me, and it also reminds me a bit of what we (as server administrators) could and couldn’t easily do. For example, nowadays we virtualize nearly everything without a second thought. Six years ago, virtualization technology certainly existed … but it hadn’t hit the level of adoption that it’s cruising at today. I look at all the boxes on the right and think “holy smokes – that’s a lot of hardware. I’m glad I don’t have all of that anymore.” It seemed like I had drives and computers everywhere, and they were all sucking down juice. I had two APC 1600W UPS units that were acting as battery backups back then. With all the servers plugged-in, they were drawing quite a bit of power. And yeah – I had the electric bill to prove it.
So, What’s Changed?
For starters, we now live on the east side of Cincinnati and have a much bigger house than we had way back when. Whenever friends come over and get a tour of the house, they inevitably head downstairs and get to see what’s in the unfinished portion of the basement. That’s where the servers are nowadays, and this is what my basement datacenter looks like in 2016:
In reality, quite a bit has changed. We have much more space in our new house, and although the “server area” is smaller overall, it’s basically a dedicated working area where all I really do is play with tech, fix machines, store parts, etc. If I need to sit at a computer, I go into the gaming area or upstairs to my office. But if I need to fix a computer? I do it here.
In terms of capabilities, the last six years have been good to me.
All Hail The Fiber
Back on the west side of town, I had a BPL (broadband-over-powerline) Internet hookup from Duke Energy and The CURRENT Group. Nowadays, I don’t even know what’s happening with that technology. It looks like Duke Energy may be trying to move away from it? In any case, I know it gave me a symmetric pipe to the Internet, and I think I had about 10Mbps up and down. I also had a secondary DSL connection (from Cincinnati Bell) that was about 2.5Mbps down and 1Mbps up.
Once I moved back to the east side of Cincinnati and Anderson Township, the doors were blown off of the barn in terms of bandwidth. Initially, I signed with Time Warner Cable for a 50Mbps download / 5Mbps upload primary connection to my house. I made the mistake of putting in a business circuit (well, I was running a business), so while it gave me some static IP address options, it ended up costing a small fortune.
My costly agreement with Time Warner ended last year, and for that I’m thankful. Nowadays, I have Cincinnati Bell Fiber coming to my house (Fioptics), and it’s a full-throttle connection. I pay for gigabit download speeds and have roughly a 250Mbps upload pipe. Realistically, the bandwidth varies … but there’s a ton of it, even on a bad day. The image on the right shows the bandwidth to my desktop as I’m typing this post. No, it’s not gigabit (at this moment) … but really, should I complain about 330Mbps download speeds from the Internet? Realistically speaking, some of the slowdown is likely due to my equipment. Running full gigabit Ethernet takes good wiring, quality switches, fast firewalls, and more. You’re only as fast as your slowest piece of equipment.
I do keep a backup connection with Time Warner Cable in case the fiber goes down, and my TMG firewall does a great job of failing over to that backup connection if something goes wrong. And yes, I’ve had a problem with the fiber once or twice. But it’s been resolved quickly, and I was back up in no time. Frankly, I love Cincinnati Bell’s fiber.
What About Storage?
In the last handful of years, storage limits have popped over and over again. You can buy 8TB drives on Amazon.com right now, and they’re not prohibitively expensive? We’ve come a long way in just a half dozen years, and the limits just keep expanding.
I have a bunch of storage downstairs, and frankly I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve graduated from the random drives and NAS appliances that used to occupy my basement. These days, I use Mediasonic RAID enclosures. You pop some drives in, connect an eSATA cable (or USB cable, if you have to), and away you go. They’ve been great self-contained pass-through drive arrays for specific virtual machines running on my Hyper-V hosts. I’ve been running the Mediasonic arrays for quite a few years now, and although this isn’t a study in “how to build a basement datacenter,” I’d recommend them to anyone looking for reliable storage enclosures. I keep one as a backup unit (because eventually one will die), and as a group they seem to be in good shape at this point in time. The enclosures supply the RAID-5 that I want (and yeah, I’ve had *plenty* of drives die), so I’ve got highly-available, hot-swappable storage where I need it.
Oh, and don’t mind the minions on my enclosures. Those of you with children will understand. Those who don’t have children (or who don’t have children in the appropriate age range) should either just wait it out or go watch Despicable Me.
Hey? What About The Cloud?
The astute will ask “why are you putting all this hardware in your house instead of shifting to the cloud?” You know, that’s a good question. I work for Cardinal Solutions Group, and we’re a Microsoft managed partner with a lot of Office 365 and Azure experience. Heck, I’m Cardinal’s National Solution Manager for Office 365, so The Cloud is what I think about day-in and day-out.
First off, I love the cloud. For enterprise scale engagements, the cloud (and Microsoft’s Azure capabilities, in particular) are awesome. Microsoft has done a lot to make it easier (not “easy,” but “easier”) for us to build for the cloud, put our stuff (like pictures, videos, etc.) in the cloud, and get things off of our thumb drives and backup boxes and into a place where they are protected, replicated, and made highly available.
What I’m doing in my basement doesn’t mean I’m “avoiding” the cloud. Actually, I moved my family onto an Office 365 plan to give them email and capabilities they didn’t have before. My kids have their first email address now, and they’re learning how to use email through Office 365. I’m going to move the SharePoint site collection that I maintain for our family (yes, I’m that big of a geek) over to SharePoint Online because I don’t want to wrangle with it at home any longer. Keeping SharePoint running is a pain-in-the-butt, and I’m more than happy to hand that over the Office 365 folks.
I’ll still be tinkering with SharePoint VMs for sure with the work I do, but I’m happy to turn over operational responsibility to Microsoft for my family’s site collection.
The Private Cloud
So even though I believe in The Cloud (i.e, “the big cloud that’s out there with all of our data”), I also believe in the “private cloud,” “personal cloud,” or whatever you want to call it. When I work from the Cardinal office, my first order of business is to VPN back to my house (again, through my TMG Firewall – they’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands) so that I have access to all of my files and systems at home.
Accessing stuff at home is only part of it, though. The other part is just knowing that I’m going through my network, interacting with my systems, and still feeling like I have some control in our increasingly disconnected world. My Plex server is there, and my file shares are available, and I can RDP into my desktop to leverage its power for something I’m working on. There’s a comfort in knowing my stuff is on my network and servers.
Critical data makes it to the cloud via OneDrive, Dropbox, etc, but I still can’t afford to pay for all of my stuff to be in the cloud. Prices are dropping all of the time, though. Will I ever give up my basement datacenter? Probably not, because maintaining it helps me keep my technical skills sharpened … but it’s also a labor of love.
Additional Reading and References
- Blog Post: Portrait of a Basement Datacenter
- Blog: Todd Klindt’s SharePoint Admin Blog
- Department of Justice: Current Group Broadband Overview
- Site: Cincinnati Bell Fioptics
- TechNet: Threat Management Gateway
- Amazon.com: Seagate Archive 8 TB Internal Hard Drive
- Amazon.com: Mediasonic PRORAID Drive Enclosure
- Amazon.com: Despicable Me
- Company: Cardinal Solutions Group
Great post Sean — it brought back memories for me too.
Before moving from Ohio to North Carolina in 2010, I had a “server room” in my basement as well. Not nearly as extensive as yours, but in that house I was lucky enough to be allowed to put in CAT5 wiring before the drywall went up during construction (this was 1999) and had great wiring everywhere.
Moving to North Carolina (Charlotte), I lost my basement and had to limit my equipment to what can fit into a closet (heat being a new factor for me to worry about). Luckily, this was timed, like you said, with the rise in virtualization and then cloud computing.
Today, my one server is used mainly for media storage and family data backups. It still has the capacity to run a few VMs, but I haven’t done that in years now.
Anyway — thanks for the post.
Thanks for the feedback, Kelly, and thanks for sharing your story! Yeah, virtualization and cloud computing has really started to change things. I’m running fewer physical boxes, but I have just as many (if not more) servers than before – they just exist as virtual machines. I could spend an entire additional article just talking technical details and implementation (and I might do just that, because a few of my gearhead friends are asking for them), but the number one question I wrangle with nowadays is “do I do it here (at home) or in the cloud?”
Some folks argue that everything should be in the cloud, but for me it’s never been that black-and-white. If I had unlimited budget, the cloud would win out more than it does right now. But for non-critical stuff (like a new blog I’m spinning-up, or a site for my kids), I have to ask myself if it’s worth the $$$ to host it elsewhere. Sure, hosting on my own or setting it up in-house has a cost; I’m not ignoring that. But it’s a “soft cost” that doesn’t involve me sending additional dollars out the door each month. My plan right now is this: if it’s non-critical, I’ll host it until I need operational resiliency. Then it goes to the cloud.
In any case, you might be surprised to hear how many people are in the same boat as you: they’re down to their one “do everything” box … and it works just fine. Today’s capacities and speeds are off-the-charts versus where we used to be, so I think it really can be practical to do what you need to do on that one server. I think it’s awesome, and at some point I may have to give up what I’m doing. Maintenance really hasn’t been too bad in recent years, though – swap a drive here, rebuild something there. But it could get prohibitive, and if it does, I’ll have to make some decisions.
Again, great to hear from you! Hopefully our paths will cross again sometime soon :-)
You read my mind. :) I did enjoy the tour of your basement datacenter in the old house, I need to visit the new one.
tk
You’re always welcome, Todd, and we’d love to have you over to the new place the next time you make a trip to Cincinnati. Let me know when you might be coming through. We’re a little closer to Shane’s place nowadays, so the drive would be a little less :-)