The first days of summer are great for an educational trip to St. Petersburg.
We will visit Miran, linxdatacenter, RETN and Metrotek.
5 am, Moskovsky station, KFC, Moika embankment, Plate, pigeons from the roofs, St. Isaac's, Field of Mars, Yandex drive Capture, and here it is - Miran.
Miran
Our lab with Eva, a broadcast server, a virtual Mikrotik Routeros, linkmeup hosting with IPv6 accessibility, and now podcast hosting have been living in Mirana for several years now.
At the entrance to Miran we were first met by an impressively sized diesel generator plant.
Most Diesel Generator Sets are on wheels for two reasons:
- Mobility - there are several more Mirana modules a couple of hundred meters away. They have their own generators - but you never know - you'll have to roll them.
- Mobility - they do not need to be registered as stationary power plants and, accordingly, design documentation is not needed.
DGU Mirana starts in a few seconds in winter and summer. During this time, the entire data center is powered by batteries.
Both the iron HP in the Miran stance and the excursion were made possible thanks to Fedor Rusakov.
The whole tour was held in a cozy homely atmosphere. Coffee with cookies, a conversation about telecoms, about the origins of the company, about transporting two hundred servers from Moscow to St. Petersburg under cover of night. Without haste, we walked around the two buildings of the data center. Both - BrownField - converted from factory premises. In the first, owned by Miran, from which we started and where on the second floor we recharged after a four-hour walk around St. Petersburg, at one time there was a plant for diesel plants, truly gigantic diesel plants. Actually there was no second floor - there were huge gates to go back and forth. Everything was dismantled, the second floor was made, active cooling, redundant power supply, gas fire extinguishing system.
A classic hot aisle, from where air is supplied to air conditioners and under a raised floor into a closed cold aisle.
Power cables are also hidden under the raised floor.
Miran was not born as a platform for one anchor client, but rather systematically developed the offer in the market where there is demand.
At one time there was a large bank here with all the necessary security guards and access control systems, but it has already moved out.
Demand continued to grow, Miran too, a second building appeared - already for rent - also BrownField - two hundred meters from the first. The road lies along the Bolshaya Nevka embankment past the Nobel's house.
The new building is built on a modular principle with the ability to transport the entire module in case of problems with the landlord. The first two boxes were bought from the manufacturer, the third was already assembled taking into account old mistakes.
The modular architecture turned out to have disadvantages - they are relatively narrow - a hot corridor - 60 cm - two people cannot disperse. And most importantly, the cost of moving, as it turned out at the first calculation, is comparable to the construction of a new one.
But they look fresh and fashionable both outside and inside.
NOC for guys on orthodox Linux, stable debian.
By the way, the company got its name from the Meridian Integrated Recorded Announcement System (MIRAN) board in the Meridian telephone switchboard. And after that, the data center was named so.
They decided to build the data center in the difficult year of 2008.
Since then, the guys have been providing dedik and bell. Operator equipment is installed in special rooms.
And this imposes certain restrictions and features on the work. For example, in racks there is the most motley equipment, both in terms of machines and in terms of networking. In Miran, I didn’t see Arista and Mellanox. All equipment has different requirements for the temperature in the cold corridor, so it has to be kept at a very low level - about 20 ° C, that is, there is no need to talk about low PUE - Miran has 1,5.
Another nuance is with snake weddings in stands. As soon as you let external comrades into the room with their connections, write “the beauty is gone.” No one has exceptions.
Alas, introducing draconian measures here may be to your detriment.
Latest photos.
And then merch from our table to yours and from yours to ours. The whole crowd loaded into taxis and into links.
linxdatacenter
These are serious guys, whose temporary pass even says “Security Matters.” This will be the leitmotif of the entire excursion.
After the gingerbread Miran at linxdatacenter, you understand that a luxury DC has arrived. On their day off, 4 people came together, frankly speaking, not in the city center to tell about themselves to other five people who are unlikely to become their clients :)
Maria Svistunova met us and took us to a large negotiating table. A little idle talk over Guatemalan coffee and off we go.
Excursions are put on stream here. Maxim and Oleg know their business: they speak in a knurled way: clearly and with enthusiasm. Where necessary, they emphasize, and where not, they bypass it. With a sense of humor, too, complete order, so more than two hours flew by unnoticed.
The pride of the data center is 100% uptime since its launch in 2011.
The confidence is so high that there is not even a place on the scoreboard for tenths.
Linx is an example of DC in GreenField format. The building was specially built for the placement of a DC in it. Therefore, the height of the ceilings, the strength of the ceilings, the power supply inputs, its redundancy, SCS were included in the project and taken into account at the construction stage.
So, by default, the floor can withstand a rack of 800 kg, but the mass can be further increased after additional strengthening. They say Oracle racks costing Falcon9 require special treatment.
The DC itself is powered by a gas-piston installation, and city electricity is only a reserve. According to Maxim, this was a very correct decision, because during the famous St. Petersburg blackout, the office and the nearby business center were damaged, but the data center continued to operate.
The diesel generator here is no longer a trailer on wheels, but a completely stationary room with chimneys rising high above the landscape.
Startup time is no more than two minutes, and the entire data center can operate on batteries for about an hour. Diesel engines can operate for 3 days without refueling.
There is order and thoughtfulness in everything here.
This is, for example, a key-holder, where data center customers can take the keys to their racks by fingerprint.
And this is a room where clients can carry out any engineering work they need, for which an entrenching tool hangs on the wall.
These are already shelves for local use with everything vital in everyday work:
It's always charged and ready to go.
The baseball cap of the novice hiphoper in the photo above saved the head of more than one person. It is hard like a natural helmet - the most it is to climb under a one and a half meter raised floor, where no, no - but some sharp piece of iron sticks out.
Actually decommissioned employees:
This unremarkable device is a differential pressure gauge.
It is designed to solve a simple problem - to maintain the pressure difference between the corridor and the engine room. For example, in order for it to be a little higher inside and when the door is opened, the dust does not fly inside, but rather fly away from the door.
The fire extinguishing system is also gas - in case of trouble, the gas displaces oxygen and stops combustion.
Only serious and very serious guys who have reasons for paranoia the size of Ararat get up in the links.
Lattices and a separate access control system from the data center are just the beginning.
That's when two people come to solve a problem or to make new connections - one with a material key, the other with an electronic one - this is already more interesting. And when an auditor wearing glasses comes from the client, goes down under the raised floor, pushes two sheets of gratings apart and says that a child’s head will crawl through here, you understand that the person has seen some interesting things in his life.
There were funny situations when, when designing a cage, they took into account everything that was possible, all security systems, all the dimensions that allow you to bring in a rack and put equipment in it, but somehow they didn’t think about the dimensions of the engineers who will work with it. And they do not fit in front or in profile between the cage and the rack.
If I were the FSB, I would put my hardware in linx 🙂
After the excursion, we sat for quite a long time, chatting heartily over pizza.
From this realm of security and order, we moved to RETN.
RETN
We have known these guys for a long time and close. Therefore, it is not surprising that we finally gathered on their roof to fry shish kebabs and poison stories.
We also visited them, although, it seems, we did not tell. Last year, plans to capture the roofs of St. Petersburg failed because of Fifa.
RETN is actually the largest backbone operator with fiber throughout the planet. Their web will be the envy of any spider.
And the DC on Obvodny is a home project for the soul that has found its niche in a growing market. This is where those who need strong connectivity with the world and access to other local operators come in.
For example, RETN does not have Netflix's CDN.
I was surprised to learn that each of their nodes is individually signed by hand with some phrase.
And these holiday boxes are being thrashed in different cities on RETN's POPs (and, obviously, not only it), delivering “Black Mirror” and “Peaky Blinders” to you as quickly as possible.
There is also a Google CDN and a bunch of operators, both local and federal.
RETN has two tiny (compared to Miranov’s) diesel generators and a car with cans for going to a gas station next to the building. Sounds almost like a family business.
Well, the evening negotiations on the roof brought us to the point that RETN would give us a virtual box for a backup site for hosting podcasts and pictures.
World guys, a superlamp data center, a network that amazes with its scale.
For some, this day ended with a duke nukem tournament, for others, with a long-awaited sleep in a hotel.
The next day we didn’t have many plans: Metrotek and the podcast live - .
Metrotek
Just a month ago, I visited a telecom podcast Misha Sokolov and Denis Gabidullin from R&D Center Metrotek Slash Plumspace, and we analyzed what Smart SFP is. Now we can touch them live.
Denis, who gave a tour of the St. Petersburg office of Metrotek (which, by the way, has not changed since our last visit to them), actually handed over one of the samples right from the doorway.
At first I was surprised at how clumsily it was made - as if with a jigsaw and a file it was carved from a 32 key.
It turned out that the body of the prototype was printed on a 3D printer from metal powder, as can be seen from the rough surface. Others - those that are ready for the series - are in perfect order.
But in general, looking at them, one wonders how they still managed to hide so many brains in an almost standard case.
I advise you to listen . It turned out interesting for my taste.
The design of the office is as ordinary as possible. Relatively small rectangular cabinets, elongated to the window, are dark enough, which pressed a little. But the atmosphere, despite the day off, reigned working.
The design has not changed in two years. I was pleased with some of the posters and boards.
We walked through several rooms: R&D, system engineers, FPGA specialists, held different types of SFPs in our hands, programmers, saw the first model in which Smart was taken out of the SFP on the wire - one of the first experiments - rather, Proof of Concept, that it works at all .
They say that it is even convenient for some clients to have such a tail sticking out of iron.
The very first goal two years ago was to assemble a conventional optical SFP that would at least transmit a signal.
Then they separately assembled the Smart part with someone else’s SFP (just on the cord) to make sure that they were able to assemble the chips.
Metrotech has done a great job. Just think that in 2 years they have assembled a fully working optical module that can encapsulate, telemetry, a precise time server, and an interface converter.
And at the same time debug to the ideal (although this has yet to be tested by time) the basic functionality of signal transmission. There should be no attenuation, there should not even be rare drops due to the fault of the SFP. And it should not get warm, despite the pack of ASICs, FPGAs and CPUs inside.
Bravo!
Complete computing system:
- CPU: NXP i.MX6 ARM up to 900 MHz
- FPGA: Lattice ECP5 up to 85K LUTs
- RAM: DDR3 up to 1 GB
Denis noted that the company practices and encourages the exchange of knowledge and experience. And then I thought: “Is it possible otherwise? 0_o". - Yes, often people come to them who, at their previous place of work, stewed in their own juice, did not communicate, did double and triple work, and generally avoided attempts to communicate.
And then I remembered that, in general, no more than two years ago I worked in one international widely banned company, where conferences were banned, and knowledge exchange was absent as a class. And it was I who was one of the evangelists of the weekly exchange meetings that seemed to save lone engineers in remote regions.
In general, internal trainings and lectures are held at Metroteka on a regular basis, which is why they are great.
And then we were taken to an amazing assembly shop. No matter how many times I visit them, it seems that my childish delight does not fade away.
Metrotek has PCB printing equipment right in the office.
A stencil for applying solder pellets, a printer for SMD components (I simply can’t call it anything else), a small stove for baking circuit boards and nearby work stations for manual installation.
To my surprise, I learned that microchips with hundreds of legs are also soldered by hand. Denis says that their guys solder the smallest parts with amazing accuracy and speed, and sometimes there is no point in running the shaitan machine - a person will do it faster.
Among ourselves, we named the Metrotek production line Eltex-verylight, in the wake of a relatively recent excursion to them.
In addition, the office has a 3D printer and a milling machine for internal needs, which, however, has already been engraved with medals for last year. .
From there we went to Krang Pizza, amazing in its ideology, where already with the full composition of linkmeup we swallowed a mutant pizza-burger both in size and in meaning and moved to the IQ option office, where we recorded the first issue .
The next day, we also looked into the Laser Center on a tip from Mammoth, where we experienced technocratic ecstasy and a little inflammation of greed, but that will be a separate story.
In conclusion, I would like to say that all the excursions and meetings turned out to be very different, both in scale of action and in focus.
Miran, who hospitably hosted our hosting, is rapidly growing, but still friendly in a simple way.
Links is a truly cool data center, with security at the forefront and experienced marketers.
RETN are young, cheerful guys “from garages” who are building a giant network and a still small data center and are not averse to building a fire on the roof.
Metrotek is a relatively small team of Russian hardware and software developers, which almost “with these very hands” makes a heap of measuring equipment that is more than competitive, and is now entering a new market with an ambitious task.
And the Laser Center, which is outside the scope of linkmeup, but is the object of our personal interests. He left a very pleasant impression and an engraving of a microphone on a voice recorder.
Source: habr.com