Just an update on my old post on OpenFiler.

I wanted to give iSCSI a play and I notices that the OpenFiler people have a prebuilt VMware appliance, sweet.

Downloaded the appliance, created a new virtual disk and presented it via iSCSI. I then install the Microsoft Initiator and connected things up. It was reasonably straight forward. The only two issues I had was you can't configure anything as iSCSI until you setup some networks and the chap authentication caused me grief for quite a while. Lastly there is very little debugging or technical info for OpenFiler, that I could find. However, I did get it running in a short period of time, that was cool.

Having build a few smaller data centers in my time I have an interest in the topic.

Came across a new organisation The Green Grid. They have an interesting white paper on Guidelines for efficient data centers.

There is some interesting info and its very practical. There is the usual stuff like hot and cold aisles and so on. However it does mention some issues which I have seen in the field but you don't hear reported much such as this one.

COORDINATION OF AIR CONDITIONERS
Many datacenters have multiple air conditioners that
actually fight each other. One may actually heat while
another cools and one may dehumidify while another
humidifies. The result is gross waste that may require
a professional assessment to diagnose.