Ethernet Storage Guy

It has been a while since I have posted anything. All Good reasons why, in that I have been kept very busy by my employer “NetApp” on some great work with customers on several very advanced technologies through the use of things we have worked very closely to integrate with Cisco and VMware, more on that in the weeks to come. I have kindof been under a information embargo and many of the things I want to talk about, well I just couldn’t/can’t. Finally, nothing else was interesting to me or sparked the passion meter, but the toys at home always do. So thanks to Duncan @yellowbricks for the idea.

In my normal dig through the very excellent technology blogs posted throughout our community I was visiting Yellow Bricks post “My Homelab” and thought to myself. I do alot of work on customer architectures and designs and most of that work is done at home, so it might also be kindof cool to document my contribution to my local power companies profits. I have some great tools to make sure that systems are off when I am on the road so I am not unnecessarily burning power. Now I don’t own all the gear, as much of the storage is on registered loan through my management at NetApp and is put to good regular use being recycled on occasion for a latest and greatest version. I have however purchased a decent amount of Cisco equipment over the years to include my entire phone system, which runs CallManager Express on a Cisco 2800 Series router with IP phones throughout the house.

Then there is the new stuff like a Nexus 5000 which Cisco has so graciously let me use for a brief period of time to work on some design concepts for some very key joint customers of ours.

When I built the house a few years ago my condition for building was that the builder let me do the cabling for everything in the house (except power). One weekend a friend and I, along with a few of our favorite beverages wired the house with over 10,000 foot of CAT6 and about 5,000 foot of RG6 satellite cable and a few runs of Fiber to my office upstairs. The other condition was building out a sub-panel for power and getting two dedicated 20-amp circuits to my communications closet. The builder thought I was nuts and the wife already knew I was so she just didn’t care < I love her.

Another piece that just worked out awesome was that we had designed the kitchen with an area that we just didn’t like once the kitchen started to come together. The redesign of that area produced an extra cabinet and a decent size piece of granite that fit nicely on the cabinet, no longer needed. It was a perfect addition to the communications closet for the token monitor, keyboard and Airport Extreme – access point of which there are now lots, even one mounted in the garage and another in the sub-ceiling near in the back of the house for those days when I want wireless coverage in the front yard or at the pool. You have to have outdoor coverage for Cisco Wireless IP Phones.

I am not a neat freak by any stretch, but cables are evil. So I mounted some hangers in the communications closet to serve as collection points for different types of cables because they seem to mate and reproduce but when hanging them, they tend to not get too wild.

As we venture to the my office it has so many direct connections to the communications closet that I am actually embarrassed to say, so we will just leave that one alone and just say that all of the rooms in the house have at-least 8 CAT6 drops. My office has accumulated quite a bit of equipment on its own and I have managed to have a dedicated 20AMP circuit for it as well but I try not to run much heavy equipment in there and use it to power a wall of monitors that I somehow can’t bring myself to the realization that I have enough. There are 4 24inch NEC’s, 2 of which are my my newly acquired Mac Pro and 2 for my Mac Book Pro or any other system I have in the room needing to run. I also have a PC hidden the desk for those moments when having a physical PC is required for whatever reason. I find that it is most often used when I call technical support for something and they tell me that they either don’t support what I am doing on a Mac or in a VM so I say fine, here ya go -brand new PC, doesn’t work there either please help me.

Now you have seen the RG6 cables for satellite and one may wonder why in the heck does he need that many satellite cables, so while it is not related to the lab it is still my pride and joy and yet another example of how perfect of a wife I have. She has allowed me to place in our great room a 65 inch LCD with two sister 50 inch LCD mounted below and a 100 inch project TV (not pictured) on the other wall in the great room. All of these are attached to my IP enabled HDMI matrix switch which allows all of them to play the same channel or serve stations from several DirecTV receivers. During the regular season for the NFL and March Madness my house turns into Man central and we just don’t miss a thing. Superbowl Sunday, coming up shortly, is also a very fun time and I can’t wait to crank the The Who at Halftime on the accompanying Denon THX System.

Finally, there is my buddy Peyton. He is a 18 pound domestic short hair cat that well, he could be a dog. Peyton will fetch certain toys and loves any Mac at which he finds himself always leaning on a keyboard and just enjoying the clicks as I type.

I hope you enjoyed the window into the the home-office. Gotta work harder to get more posts out on the site.

Until Next Time, Trey