Chicago: Seeking IT Help for a Melting Server Rack (and Beyond)

April 18, 2024 3:38 PM

Do you know of any contract IT providers in Chicago that are great?

I am working for a company in Chicago that currently has about 100 tb of data on a rack of Qualstar servers that is chronically overheating. (Think, archive of decades worth of stuff, not terribly well sorted)

We have ordered new hardware, but now we need someone with expertise to help us get the data transferred. We will help us with ongoing IT stuff that you might expect a group of <20 people using computers every day, and are in a moment where the ownership of our small company is changing hands, so there may be some IT issues that will come up with that too.

Thanks in advance for your recommendations!

posted by wowenthusiast to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Forwarded this to Mr Sencha - he and most of his friends work in this field in Chicago, will MeMail you if he knows of anyone who's both good and potentially available.
posted by sencha at 3:58 PM on April 18 [2 favorites]

Can I offer you some advice as someone who does this for a living (not specifically your challenge but those like it). You already bought equipment but you don’t know what to do with it. Can it be returned or otherwise used as a non-requirement. So many projects I have been engaged in determined the setup that drove the project with better options are available.

I don’t know if you purchased Quakstar servers or if overheating literally means their temps are up but have biweekly calls with them until this is resolved. You might not have a support contract but you need a TAM (technical assistant manager) able to raise this to executive level.

Going through legal transfer is huge and frankly you need spending to sue. Your best consulting you will probably be the name above paired with (ugh, Accenture) or someone that can do nothing but add value as someone you can sue. I hate it, I don’t know enough about large data migrations but I do know of risks, and those big companies are there to mitigate that depending on the politics internally.

Be ready to play the politics of a real estimate of 18 months with a lot of unknowns versus upper management wanting a waterfall plan. I can’t help you but do whatever you can to slow things down to make it look good for management and the consultant time to figure out the problem.

Sorry I’ve worked with large, large data (think ceph) and big politics. There’s only so much you can do to keep politics at bay. Legal stuff like transfers really put a hamper on these things.
posted by geoff. at 7:24 AM on April 19 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: thanks for these insights and recommendations I confess this is my first possibly melting server situation.
posted by wowenthusiast at 12:04 PM on April 19

If they’re really melting can you install hvacs quickly and maybe move them into new spaces? I know that’s risky too but from experience unless you’re a huge company that’s a lot of data and RAID will fail during restoration m, backups might not work, etc. this might simply contact a GC and find a short term solution
posted by geoff. at 5:26 PM on April 19

Response by poster: Thank you! We do think it's possible the HVAC may not be working as well as it should and having some box fans blowing air away from it, which does seem to be helping. The AC not working might be a thing that went on for a long time during covid (with the doors closed to the room no less).

I have heard that the temperature is regularly reaching 150 degrees on the drives themselves (although i am not sure how this number is known) and they whir loudly to life from time to time when not being accessed. Not currently throwing errors but the people are concerned.

Thanks for sharing your wisdom and sending good vibes!
posted by wowenthusiast at 7:22 PM on April 19