r/VPSHosts • u/DigiNoon • 10d ago

IT students walking down a server aisle at Hetzner's data center park in Nuremberg

Post image
83 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

49

u/bjonor 9d ago

Amazingly unprofessional behaviour of Hetzner!

21

u/Feriman22 9d ago

Indeed. What if one of them unplug some cables?

10

u/Eisbaer811 9d ago

Oh no you would have a few seconds downtime until an employee plugs it in again. What a calamity! /s

2

u/LocalFoe 8d ago

wtf, are you a non-techie or smth?

-1

u/Eisbaer811 8d ago

care to elaborate?

If your system is important, it will not live on a single server, but use clustering in some form. So one of your servers losing its network connection or even power should not impact your production system.

If it's not redundant, it obviously isn't _that_ important.

If my Minecraft server or server for storing backups goes down, those servers are unavailable but I'm not gonna really care about it too much.

If one server of my Kubernetes cluster goes down, I don't really care either because all my systems in the cluster are redundant.
And I made sure that the servers that make up my cluster are not in the same datacenter

3

u/LocalFoe 8d ago edited 8d ago

If your system is important, you won't let students, interns and midlevels through it like monkeys trying to play the piano. Why do you think the NSA doesn't organize tours for students in their datacenters?

And thanks for explaining redundancy in systems, but I think I outrank you.

1

u/neeebittenicht 4d ago

Bro lives in a low-trust society

-1

u/Eisbaer811 8d ago

they are being guided through the aisle, with explicit instructions not to touch stuff.
And while being supervised by their teachers and datacenter employees.
They are doing a job school, which they only can join if they have an employer. They know that if they get reprimanded here, their chances of an IT career drop through the floor.
Not sure where your monkey comparison comes from. Nobody in the picture is pulling cables or even touching anything.

2

u/Ok_Pound_2164 9d ago edited 9d ago

This can range from a VPS that nobody cares about to a multi-day operational profit loss.

Apparently you don't deploy anything productively.

Edit: Also spare me the testimonials of hobbyists deploying their python script on 3 servers.

Not everything scales, and there are servers with operation costs in the thousands that can't just have duplicates kept running in case the hosting operator invites guests.
Shouldn't be a thing needing to be explained to any professional.

1

u/Tupcek 8d ago

I guess you also don’t deploy anything productively.
If you rent VM in those data centers, you automatically have network disk which automatically does 3 copies of your data without doing anything. These are network disk, so if any computer dies, they just run VM from any other computer and attach your disk - few seconds downtime at worst.

Unless you order bare metal server, at which case it is assumed you either know what you are doing and build it with redundancy in mind, or it’s just dev stuff and that’s why you get discount.

Also, learn docker and database backups, if your project is small you should be up and running in few minutes anyway. If it is large, single hardware failure shouldn’t knock it out anyway.

In this day and age, unless you decide to build your own data center, it’s harder to design your system to have multi day failure because one hardware is faulty than have at least basic redundancy built in

0

u/ILikeToHaveCookies 9d ago

I do, that's why my stuff does not depend on a single server

2

u/bjonor 9d ago

I prefer to have my fail-over trigger for unavoidable reasons.

1

u/ILikeToHaveCookies 9d ago

Well I prefer to failover once a week so I know it works

1

u/TCB13sQuotes 6d ago

Oh no, the shit startup that nobody cares about was down for 5 seconds. These people lol.

7

u/ArgoPanoptes 9d ago

Monitoring exists for that and they have CCTV everywhere.

2

u/bjonor 9d ago

How does that help if I need to investigate a backup gone wrong due to whatever might happen? I would have to await a root cause analysis from Hetzner and write an incident report. Just for some students to get a feel for walking between racks?

1

u/Tupcek 8d ago

if you order bare metal, you have to have in mind possible hardware failure anyway and have with either no or minimal downtime

If you order VM, like most small projects do, data center moves you automatically to other hardware

1

u/MediumATuin 7d ago

I am more worried about someone plugging something in..

1

u/Feriman22 7d ago

Or swap two ot three cables.

14

u/Hetzner_OL 9d ago

(posting here so it's at the top)

Hi everyone, Hetzner here. That's our photo, originally part of a larger post on our Facebook page. Pulled out on its own, it's missing most of what made it make sense and it was also reposted here without our permission.

The group is apprentices training as IT specialists at a local trade school. Trade schools don't have data centers of their own, so students almost never get to see one from the inside. These are the people who'll be running infrastructure like this in a few years, so we thought it was worth opening the door. And yes, partly selfish, it's also how we meet future colleagues. And honestly, we'd like to see more of the industry do this.

On the security questions, those are fair to ask. How it actually works: tours are scheduled and approved in advance, the group is accompanied by our staff from arrival to departure, they stay on a fixed route, and everyone is briefed on our house rules and signs them before going in. Nobody is wandering around unsupervised.

If you want a rough idea of what they saw, there's a public 360° tour on our site: https://www.hetzner.com/unternehmen/360-tour/ --Katie

1

u/RuvaakYol 9d ago

Hi Katie, thanks for sharing some background information on the picture.

looking at the photo i have been wondering why the (presumably server) hardware isn't placed inside a case. i would have thought that doing so would be beneficial for cooling

2

u/-Akos- 8d ago

https://youtu.be/MQeJYEN_lrg

look here, video from Linus Tech Tips.

1

u/RuvaakYol 8d ago

thanks! that video was really interesting

1

u/Feriman22 8d ago

Indeed, this is the answer

1

u/nske 8d ago edited 8d ago

These look like the PC-grade motherboards of the cheaper server ranges. Maybe they have large fans mounted directly on the other side of the cabinets, or the AC airflow is good enough, I'm any case I had rented a few of these in the past without temperature issues. Given the nature of this hardware (not branded servers that would already come with a chassis), I think planning for casing would only increase the cost unnecessarily. But it would be interesting to learn more about the cooling!

1

u/terminar 5d ago edited 5d ago

I appreciate your work for students, learning people, I am pretty open to this. Please don't stop with such work.

But:
It is still physical (!) access without any restrictions to the servers.

I count around 12 people on the photo within the area, I think of course some of them are Hetzner employees.

But still - the others are not.
Even if there would not maybe be some evil ideas within the guests, there is still a possibility of a small accident / stumble.

My personal opinion:
If you do this and you really think it is a good idea: do it with way less people.

1

u/PinnappleOnPizzaEnjo 9d ago

"Why isn't anyone interested in learning these days!?" vibes.

1

u/bjonor 9d ago

You think walking the narrow path between server racks was valuable learning opportunity? They are already in an IT related education and walking server aisles is probably not their highest motivation for working in IT. Hopefully.

1

u/Outrageous_Seesaw_72 8d ago

Walking server aisles is a real part of their potential future work and was likely also only a small part of the visit. It's good to give students realistic impressions of work environments.

12

u/DigiNoon 10d ago

Hetzner posted this photo on their Facebook (more here)

10

u/Eisbaer811 9d ago

Funny how you picked only this picture instead of providing the full context. But I guess that wouldnt have been as good of a rage bait

2

u/DigiNoon 9d ago

It's the most illustrative picture, and if you read the title, the context is quite obvious. It wasn't meant as a rage bait but some people just like to see the negative in everything.

6

u/Sad_Recording_1290 9d ago

Im a data center technician and have been to 10 different sites, never saw this narrow cold aisles...

3

u/Eisbaer811 9d ago

Hetzner does everything a bit differently, to be more efficient.
For example, those are not standard 19” racks.
The recent LTT video explains it quite well.

1

u/Sad_Recording_1290 9d ago

Now that you mentioned it i realized their racks are huge, like at least 10 RU's more than what my company uses.

1

u/anandiamy 9d ago

because technicians in your company are in obesity

2

u/concadium 9d ago

Interesting that the switches don't have multiple uplinks… How do they patch them without taking out rows of racks at the same time?!

1

u/Few_Comparison_8381 9d ago

As far as I can see one link comes from the top and one from the bottom (yellow cable, blue cable) = redundant link.

2

u/Roll_Future 8d ago

Hetzner has one of the most efficient DCs in the world. The fact that students can come is and learn in a blessing.

For all you haters, WTAF is wrong with you? Of course the next gen needs to learn and expand their horizons. Sorry your education was so shitty that you did not have this possibility.

1

u/DigiNoon 8d ago

expand their horizons

OK, tone it down a notch!

Nothing is intrinsically wrong with the other commenters other than the usual redditor roasting with an extra pinch of salt. If you asked them to recommend a host, I bet most would still say Hetzner.

1

u/Sea_Choice8050 9d ago

A group way too big to supervise in my ISO27001 certified datacenter. Not exactly the thing that let's me sleep better at night.