At the end of my Learning from a Blender post, I alluded to a project George Wright’s presentation inspired. Armed with a video camera and a bit of inspiration, I headed to our H2 data center to capture our own “obvious” video for our customers. Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” series features their Total Blender in a way few had ever seen a blender before. Blenders are designed to dice and slice, so they recorded themselves dicing and slicing … albiet a few unconventional objects.

We help our customers build their businesses on servers in our data centers, so why not disassemble a server and rebuild it on camera for you? While the server-building process isn’t nearly as noisy or destructive as blending marbles, it gives our customers an opportunity to see their server – or in this case, one like it – from a different perspective: inside-out.

When I asked the data center managers about recording a server build on video, they jumped at the opportunity. Transparency is one of The Planet’s goals, and by showing you how your server’s components fit together, we’re giving you that “insider” perspective.

Follow Scott Stanley, an H2 data center supervisor, as he builds a Xeon 3060 – SAS server:

Key Components:

• 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon “Conroe” 3060 processor
• 4GB DD2 667 ECC RAM
• 146GB 10K RPM SAS HDD
• SAS drive card
• Dell PowerEdge 840 tower chassis

If you’ve never seen how all of the components are laid out inside a server, consider this your crash course. Do you have any questions about the server construction process? Is there anything “behind the scenes” like this that you want to see for yourself? Leave a comment below and let us know!

-Kevin

P.S. The background music is courtesy of Brandon Holbrook at Royalty Free Music X. Thanks Brandon!