So you want to build your own data center

Reminds me of the old Rackspace days! Boy we had some war stories:

   - Some EMC guys came to install a storage device for us to test... and tripped over each other and knocked out an entire Rack of servers like a comedy skit. (They uh... didn't win the contract.)
   - Some poor guy driving a truck had a heart attack and the crash took our DFW datecenter offline. (There were ballards to prevent this sort of scenario, but the cement hadn't been poured in them yet.)
   - At one point we temporarily laser-beamed bandwidth across the street to another building
   - There was one day we knocked out windows and purchased box fans because servers were literally catching on fire.

Data center science has... well improved since the earlier days. We worked with Facebook on the OpenCompute Project that had some very forward looking infra concepts at the time.

Many years ago I had a BlackDiamond dropped on my foot during installation at INTX LON1 for LINX, disabling me for hours. The switch in question was evidently cursed: later that week a spanning tree misconfiguration on the same unit then disabled LINX for hours, throwing half of Britain's ISP peering into temporary chaos, and everyone else involved in that project was dead within two years.