The Elephant on an Adventure: A Custom-Built Shelter for Network Devices (denog16)

We take you along on our adventurous journey through the design and implementation phases of a custom-built outdoor cabinet, from conception to completion, sharing what we’ve learned in the process. While building a new fiber network from scratch, Eurofiber faced a dilemma: We needed to install network devices in the great outdoors of Berlin’s heating power plant sites, but your typical data center devices wouldn’t fit in the standard telco cabinets available on the market. For our purposes, we require full-depth racks, access from both sides, and active cooling. So we could either go for smaller, hardened outdoor equipment, which limits the choice of devices. Or we’d have to buy concrete data center containers the size of a garage, which are larger than we need, take more bureaucracy to build, and are also expensive. To bridge this gap and keep the costs reasonable, we designed our own micro-datacenter, basically a larger street cabinet tailored specifically to our requirements: It provides active cooling, front and rear access, and fits full-depth devices while providing redundant power and sufficient protection from the elements. This adventure took us deep into the engineering world of the infrastructure required for operating network devices. Have you ever had to consider cooling capacities, battery temperatures, air-flow velocities, or noise emission laws? We take you through the design process as well as the lessons we learned on the construction site and the operational experiences after finally taking the network into production. Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://pretalx.com/denog16/talk/8GNVX9/