Maybe I Didn't Shout Loud Enough?

Have you seen the rather fantastic and funny video about shouting at your disks in the datacentre? If you haven't, you should... it's interesting stuff.

So much so that when we talked storage in the MCM Exchange R2 rotation we just finished, we decided to test this theory ourselves. So our instructor, Jud Doran from Microsoft's Exchange Center of Excellence in Redmond set up a webcam next to a storage array we have in the lab we use and sent over some poor soul (that would be me) to shout at some disks, whilst he and the class watched me through the webcam and listened to me over my cell phone and OCS at Jud's end.

It was already noisy in there. But I gave it my best effort and shouted at the disks - and nothing happened... so I did it again... still, nothing... so we concluded that either I can't shout loud enough (I think that's unlikely, but I was out voted), the array we have is too good at dampening vibration, the disks in the array were too spread out, or, just to make me look daft, I was shouting at the wrong array...but it would be entertaining to those that were watching...

So seeing as how it didn't work, I yanked a disk out. :-) that didn't really do much either, so conclusion was - good storage. Lots of green twinkly lights and the storage carried on just fine. .

I did get some very funny looks though from the three guys standing outside the door to the lab when I came out.....

Picture courtesy of Morten Kjønnø

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 21, 2009
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  April 22, 2009
  Oh come on, you have to post that video now! Set it to music as well. I recommend "Shot at the Devil" modified to become "Shout at the Disk Drives!"