The Big Upgrade in pictures

New Cisco blades, engines and power supplies

DELLs boxes among which new switches

Aerial view of the old cabling

Frontal view of the mess

Cables unplugged from the cisco

Cisco old blades with services racks still connected

New cat6a cisco cabling aerial view nice and tidy

Frontal view of the new cisco blades and cabling nice and tidy

Old and new rack switches front view

Old and new rack switches rear view

Emptying and reorganising the racks

Empty racks ready to be filled with new machines

Old DELLs cemetery

Old cables cemetery. All the cat5e cables going under the floor from the racks to the cisco half of the cables from the rack switches to the machines and all the patch cables in front of the cisco shown above have gone.

All the racks but two have now the new switches but the machines are still connected with cat5e cables. Upgrading the network cards will be done in Phase two one rack at the time to minimize service disruption.

The downtime lasted 6 days. Everybody who was involved did a great job and the choice of 10GBASE-T was a good one because the ports auto-negotiation is allowing us to run at 3 different speeds on the same switches: PDU 100Mbps, old WN and storage at 1Gbps, and the connection with the cisco is 10Gbps. We also kept one of the old cisco blades for connections that don't require 10Gbps such as the out-of-band management cables plus two racks of servers that will be upgraded at a later stage are still connected at 1Gbps to the cisco. And we finished perfectly in time for the start of data taking (and Easter). :)