Visiting Dave Dood at the Sanger Centre - 23rd April 2004
Former Trigenix (3G LAB) sysadmin, Dave, moved on to work at the Sanger Centre. The boys eventually got round to organising a visit to see him and all his cool "big iron" toys. The Sanger Centre is one of Nosher's "wish list" places to work - there's some totally cool science (it's the place that has undertaken much of the human genome sequencing project), massive IT infrastructure (nearly half a peta-byte of storage) and a great university-like campus. So cool, some of this stuff could be considered geek pr0n :-) Some photos are the generous contribution of Nick's digicam.
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These are cropped thumbnails. Click on an image to view the full photograph.
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Craig tries out a 1U Apple |
Dave shows us around machine-room "A" |
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Dave stands in front of an Extreme Networks' switch... |
...and then Nick scopes it out. |
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Outside the Sanger Centre - the guys do the "tourist" thing |
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Next, we take a stroll to machine-room "B" |
Looking back at the Sanger building |
Looking at more kit |
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Not the usual plug'n'sockets |
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A colleague of Dave's in the middle of switching around a load of blade servers... |
...and shows us one of the blade servers: Intel Xeon, 1GB memory and a couple of 40(?) Gig drives |
The whole lot exposed: around 200 high-spec computers in a case. It's worth it just for the LED count! |
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A whole stack of old pizza-box 1U servers |
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A bunch of UPSs |
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Another pre-blade server cluster, with multiple 1U pizza-box servers |
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Craig stands in front of a monster power unit: it runs at about 250 kilowatts |
Nosher's used to seeing switches with a fibre backbone interconnect, but this is an actual fibre switch... |
...and an even bigger one |
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The grounds. How cool is this... |
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passing the conference centre on the way to the pub |
Hinxton Hall - in the grounds of the Sanger Centre |
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Nearing the Hinxton Red Lion |
Craig orders a Bitburger beer. Coz it's, er, got the word "bit" in it (geek moment :-) |
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