The early days of summer are perfect for a developmental trip to St. Petersburg.
We will visit Miran, linxdatacenter, RETN, and Metrotek.

5 AM, Moscow Station, KFC, the Moika Embankment, the Plate, pigeons on the rooftops, St. Isaac's Cathedral, Mars Field, Captur Yandex Drive, and here it is — Miran.

Miran

Our lab with Eva has been living in Miran for several years now, a streaming server, a virtual Mikrotik RouterOS, linkmeup hosting with IPv6 availability, and now podcast hosting.

At the entrance to Miran, we were first greeted by a remarkably sized diesel generator.

Most Diesel Generator Units are mounted on wheels for two reasons:

• Mobility — in a couple of hundred meters, there are several other modules of Miran. They have their own generators — you never know — we might need to move them.
• Mobility — they do not need to be registered as stationary power plants and, consequently, they do not require project documentation.

The Miran DGUs start in winter and summer in just a few seconds. During this time, the entire data center is powered by battery packs.

The iron HP in the Miran rack and the tour were made possible thanks to Fyodor Rusakov.

The whole tour took place in a cozy homely atmosphere. Coffee with cookies, discussions about telecoms, the company's origins, and the transport of two hundred servers from Moscow to St. Petersburg under the cover of night. We strolled leisurely through the two data center buildings. Both are BrownField — repurposed from factory premises. The first, owned by Miran, where we started and where we recharged on the second floor after a four-hour walk around St. Petersburg, used to house a factory for truly gigantic diesel units. In fact, there was no second floor — there were huge gates for in-and-out access. Everything was dismantled, a second floor was made, along with active cooling, redundant power supply, and a gas fire suppression system.

A classic hot aisle, from where air is supplied to the air conditioners and under the false floor into a closed cold aisle.

Power cables are also hidden under the false floor.

Miran was not born as a site for a single anchor client, but rather systematically developed its offerings in a market where there is demand.

At one time, there was a large bank here with all the necessary bars and security systems, but it has since moved out.

Demand continued to grow, and so did Miran; a second building—also for rent—emerged just two hundred meters from the first. The road runs along the banks of the Bolshaya Neva past Nobel's house.

The new building was constructed modularly, allowing for the entire module to be transported in case of issues with the landlord. The first two modules were purchased from the manufacturer, while the third was assembled considering previous mistakes.

However, the modular architecture had its drawbacks—it's relatively narrow—a hot corridor of 60 cm makes it impossible for two people to pass each other. Most importantly, the cost of moving, as revealed in the first calculations, is comparable to building new.

Yet, they appear fresh and stylish both inside and out.

The NOC team operates on a stable Debian version of Orthodox Linux.

By the way, the company got its name from the Meridian Integrated Recorded Announcement (MIRAN) board in the Meridian telephone switch. The data center was named after it as well.

The decision to build the data center came in the challenging year of 2008.

Since then, the team has been providing dedicated servers and colocation services. Equipment from various operators is installed in special rooms.

This imposes certain limitations and characteristics on operations. For example, the racks house a highly diverse array of equipment, both in terms of machines and networking. At Miran, I barely saw any Arista or Mellanox equipment. Each piece of equipment has different temperature requirements in the cold corridor, so it must be maintained at a very low level—around 20°C—meaning low PUE is not feasible; at Miran, it is 1.5.
Another nuance is due to the snake weddings in the racks. Once you let external acquaintances in with their connections, you can forget about the cleanliness. No one is exempt.

Unfortunately, implementing draconian measures can be counterproductive.

Latest photos.

And then the merch from our table to yours and from yours to ours. We all piled into a taxi and headed to Linx.

linxdatacenter

These are serious folks; even their temporary passes state "Security Matters." This theme resonates throughout the entire tour.

After the cookie-cutter Miran, entering linxdatacenter makes you realize you’ve arrived at a luxury data center. On a day off, four people came together not exactly in the city center to share their stories with five others who are unlikely to become their clients 🙂

We were greeted by Maria Svistunova, who guided us to a large negotiation table. After a bit of casual conversation over Guatemalan coffee, we moved forward.

Excursions here are streamlined. Maxim and Oleg know their stuff: they stick to a practiced routine, speaking clearly and with enthusiasm. They emphasize where needed, and where it's not necessary, they tactfully avoid it. Their sense of humor is also on point, making the two-plus hours pass by unnoticed.

The pride of the data center is its 100% uptime since its launch in 2011.

The confidence is so high that there isn’t even a spot on the scoreboard for fractions of a second.

Linx is a model data center in the GreenField format. The building was specifically constructed to house a data center. Therefore, the ceiling height, floor strength, power supply inputs, and redundancy were all accounted for in the project during the construction phase.

For instance, by default, the floor can withstand a load of 800 kg, but the weight can be increased after additional reinforcement. There are rumors that Oracle racks costing as much as Falcon9 require special handling.

The data center is powered by a gas-piston installation, while the city electricity serves solely as a backup. According to Maxim, this was a very wise decision because during the well-known blackout in St. Petersburg, the office and the nearby business center suffered, while the data center continued to operate.

The diesel generator here is no longer a trailer on wheels, but a fully stationary unit with smokestacks towering high above the landscape.

The startup time is no more than two minutes, and the entire data center can run on batteries for about an hour. The diesel can operate for three days without refueling.

Here, order and thoughtfulness reign supreme.

This is an example of a key control point where data center clients can retrieve keys to their racks using their fingerprints.

And this is a room where clients can carry out any necessary engineering work, for which a set of tools is displayed on the wall.

These are shelves for local operations, equipped with everything essential for daily tasks:

It is always charged and ready for use.

The cap of the aspiring hip-hop artist in the photo above has saved more than one person's head. It is as solid as a real hard hat, perfect for crawling under the one-and-a-half-meter false floor, where a sharp piece of metal occasionally protrudes.

Here are the staff from operations:

This unremarkable device is a differential manometer.

It is designed to solve a simple task: to maintain the pressure difference between the corridor and the machine room. For example, to ensure that the pressure inside is slightly higher, preventing dust from blowing in when the door is opened.

The fire suppression system is also gas-based; in case of an emergency, the gas displaces oxygen and suppresses combustion.

In Linx, only serious and very serious guys stand up, those who have reasons for paranoia the size of Ararat.

Grills and a separate access control system from the data center is just the beginning.

When two people arrive to resolve a problem or for new connections—one with a physical key, the other with an electronic one—it gets more interesting. And when an auditor from the client, wearing glasses, descends under the false floor, moves aside two sheets of grills, and says that a child's head could fit through here, you realize that this person has seen some interesting things in their life.

There were amusing situations when designing the cage where everything conceivable was taken into account—safety systems, the dimensions that allow for bringing in racks and placing equipment—but somehow no one thought about the size of the engineers who would be working with it. They can't fit between the cage and the rack either from the front or the side.

If I were the FSB, I would place my hardware in Linx 🙂

After the tour, we sat for quite a while, chatting warmly over pizza.
From this kingdom of safety and order, we headed to RETN.

RETN

We’ve known these guys for a long time and close up. So, it’s no surprise that we finally gathered on their roof to grill and share stories.

We've been there before, though it seems we haven't told you about it. Last year, plans to conquer the rooftops of St. Petersburg fell through due to FIFA.

RETN is actually the largest backbone operator with fiber across the globe. Any spider would envy their web.

And the data center on the bypass is a kind of soul project that has found its niche in the growing market. This is where those who need robust connectivity with the world and access to other local operators set up.

For example, CDN of Netflix is hosted at RETN.

I was surprised to learn that each of their nodes is individually signed by hand with some phrase.
And such festive boxes are being hammered out in different cities at RETN's POPs (and, evidently, not just his), delivering ‘Black Mirror’ and ‘Peaky Blinders’ to you as quickly as possible.

There’s also Google’s CDN and a bunch of operators, both local and federal.

At RETN, next to the building, there are two tiny diesel generators (compared to Miran's) and a truck with canisters to go for refueling. It sounds almost like a family business.

Well, the evening negotiations on the roof led us to the fact that RETN will provide us with a virtual server for the backup site for hosting podcasts and images.
Global guys, an ultra-cozy data center, an impressive network in terms of scale.

For some, this day ended with a Duke Nukem tournament, and for others, a long-awaited sleep at the hotel.

The next day, we didn’t have many plans: Metrotek and a live podcast — linkmeup IRL.

Metrotek

Just a month ago, guests of the telecom podcast were Misha Sokolov and Denis Gabidullin from Metrotek NTG slash Plumspace, and we discussed what Smart SFP is. And now we were able to check them out in person.

Denis, who led the tour around Metrotek's St. Petersburg office (which, by the way, has not changed since our last visit), handed us one of the samples right at the doorway.
I was initially surprised at how roughly made it was — as if it had been carved out of a 32mm key with a jigsaw and a file.

It turned out that the housing of the prototype was printed on a 3D printer from metal powder, which was evident from the rough surface. The others — those ready for series production — are in good shape.

But overall, looking at them, you marvel at how they managed to fit such a large quantity of brains into an almost standard case.

I recommend listening to the podcast about Roza, Toza, and their sister Boza.. It turned out interesting, in my opinion.

The office design is maximally ordinary. Relatively small rectangular offices, elongated towards the window, quite dark, which felt a bit oppressive. But the atmosphere, despite it being a weekend, was quite productive.

The decor hasn’t changed in two years. I was pleased by some posters and boards.

We visited several rooms: R&D, systems engineers, FPGA specialists, handled different types of SFP, programmers, and saw the first model where Smart was moved out of the SFP onto a cable — one of the first experiments — more like a Proof of Concept to see if it actually works.

They say some clients even find it convenient to have such a tail sticking out of the hardware.
The very first goal two years ago was to create a regular optical SFP that could at least transmit a signal.

Then we separately assembled the Smart part with someone else's SFP (just on the cable) to ensure they could combine the chips.

Metrotek has done tremendous work. Just think, in 2 years they created a fully functional optical module that handles encapsulation, telemetry, a precise time server, and an interface converter.

And at the same time, they refined the basic signal transmission functionality to perfection (although this still needs to be tested over time). There should be no attenuation, and no rare drops due to the SFP. Plus, it shouldn't overheat, despite the pack of ASICs, FPGAs, and CPUs inside.
Bravo!

A full-fledged 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 knowledge and experience sharing. And I thought: "Isn't it always like this? 0_o" — Yes, often people come to them who have been working in isolation at their previous jobs, not communicating, doing double and triple work, and generally avoiding attempts at communication.

And then I remembered that, not so long ago, I worked in a widely banned international company where conferences were prohibited, and knowledge exchange was nonexistent. I was one of the evangelists for weekly experience-sharing meetings that seemed to save lonely engineers in remote areas.

In general, Metrotek regularly holds internal training sessions and lectures, which is commendable.

Then they took us into a fascinating assembly workshop. No matter how many times I've been there, my childhood delight never fades.

Metrotek has equipment for printing on boards right in their office.

A stencil for applying solder balls, an SMD components printer (otherwise I can’t call it anything else), a small oven for baking boards, and nearby workstations for manual assembly.

To my surprise, I learned that microchips with hundreds of legs are also soldered by hand. Denis says that their team can solder the tiniest parts with astonishing precision and speed, and sometimes it's not worth starting the contraption — a person can do it faster.

We informally named the production line Metrotek Eltex-verilight, inspired by a relatively recent visit to them.

Additionally, the office has a 3D printer and a milling machine for internal needs, which, however, has already been used to engrave medals for last year's Chaos Construction.

From there, we headed to the incredibly creative Krang Pizza, where the full team of linkmeup devoured a mutant pizza-burger both in size and concept, and then moved on to the IQ option office, where we recorded the first episode. linkmeup IRL.

The next day, we also visited the Laser Center on Mammoth's recommendation, where we experienced technocratic ecstasy and a bit of greed, but that deserves a separate story.

In conclusion, I want to say that all the tours and meetings turned out to be quite different, both in scale and focus.

Miran, who hospitably hosted our hosting, is rapidly growing but still friendly and simple.

Links is truly a cool data center, with security in focus and experienced marketers.
RETN is a group of young, fun guys 'from garages' who are building a gigantic network and still have a small data center and are happy to light up a little fire on the roof.

Metrotek is a relatively small team of Russian hardware and software developers, which produces a pile of measurement equipment that's more than competitive, and is now entering a new market with ambitious goals.

And the Laser Center, which goes beyond linkmeup's interests but is of personal interest to us. It left a very pleasant impression and engraved a little microphone on the recorder.

Source: habr.com