Is It Supposed to Look Like That?

squished-cassatt

Yes, this Cassatt mobile computing cluster is supposed to be square.

It's trade show season, so it's a good time for this anecdote, which can be filed under "A funny thing happened on the way to the expo booth ..." Perhaps it wasn't so funny at the time. But Jay Fry from Cassatt shares an interesting account of some last-minute excitement on the expo floor at the recent Gartner data center conference in Las Vegas, when he unpacked the company's mobile computing cluster demo equipment.    

"When we got to the booth, our sturdy data-center-in-a-box looked like it had been sat upon by a large elephant. Or had been on the receiving end of a very angry forklift," Jay writes, adding that "something very heavy had definitely come into contact with the crate, warping the frame so much that the servers were no longer sitting squarely in their tracks. In fact, there wasn't much 'squareness' left at all."

What do do? Treat it like a disaster recovery scenario and fire those babies up! Carefully. "Truth be told, we also used the next few seconds to glance over to see where the fire extinguishers were, and how close our nearest usable exit actually was," says Jay, who shares the rest of the story on his blog.