The new rolls into town....

Infrastructure Jun 29, 2020

After what seems like an age, we finally have our hands on some shiny new compute resource for our IaaS platform......the Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 Modular Infrastructure. Yes, that’s right we have two new blade chassis and a number of PowerEdge MX740c nodes ready to bolster our HPE Synergy platform.

Here's an ever so slightly hyperbolic overview from the Dell marketing team Kinetic Infrastructure!!

It all starts with a pallet of boxes turning up almost unannounced at the datacentre despite our best efforts to co-ordinate. Couriers are a law unto themselves. In days gone by, every item on the BOM (bill of materials) would have been individually boxed and protected in foam but things have improved somewhat… these blade chassis arrived fully loaded with all components installed including new compute nodes.

You might guess that being fully loaded they do tend to weight a bit…. fortunately, our friendly datacentre has a heavy lift to assist with getting these into their racks, which is ideal and means I don’t have to explain a back injury to HR.

Final resting location nestled between one of our Pure Storage arrays and the aging Dell M1000e Chassis its replacing……almost ready for action!

Our next challenge in the process is getting the appropriate power to the rack, something that seems harder than it should. Then we’ll spend the next week or so testing and putting it through its paces. There are multiple layers of redundancy in these things, and before it goes into production, we’ll set the chaos monkeys free and see if we can break it!

The future is bright

From here we are looking pretty good for compute resource in both Christchurch and Auckland where we have also deployed an MX7000 Chassis fully loaded with Dell PowerEdge MX740c nodes. The hardware side of things really is relatively straight forward, whereas the software side can be a little more challenging. In future posts I will cover off the joys of maintaining the ever-changing matrix of driver versions, firmware versions, and OS versions along with security patches and bugfixes in a multivendor environment. All this of course, whilst ensuring a rock-solid platform for our customers.