So who starts a building refurb without consulting with the faculty dept?

So who starts a building refurb without consulting with the faculty facilities dept?

Exactly. Had no issue with water but when an existing room had been newly appointed as data centre, we found that its concrete ceiling did not meet the required specs. So we had to reinforce the ceiling with glueing carbon fibre ribbons underneath (whatever the technical term for this is, idk).

Rant Warning

My Facilities team were the bane of my life and seemed to actively sabotage everything I did at my expense.

They replaced the spec of UPS I provided after 12 months research on current and future loading as ;'we know better and this will save electrical costs of operation'. I ended up with a UPS which couldn't support the start up load of the data center. Their proposed solution was to start up services 1 at a time, meaning return to service after an outage would take 7 hours. I ended up having to fund a larger replacement UPS from my budget, we got almost scrap value from the manufacturer for the undersized one. To make matter worse the larger one was a different range so all the tray work and cabling also needed replacing to fit it.

I was managing a PC roll out when they suddenly announced that they were taking away the storage for the roll out. Again their 'work around' was to leave pallets of PC's in offices as they were delivered awaiting roll out, we only lost one layer of a pallet where someone had emptied the bottom layer and removed the PC' but hey, that was only £10,000 of my money.

The most annoying was when I came to replace the air con units for the DC and change the airflow to botom to top, the old chillers had been fighting the cabinet cooling. By this time I had the support of my CIO so when they proposed installing 3 units rather than 3 this was knocked back and I had my way with 50% over capacity in normal operation, we managed this by cycling units with 2 out of 3 on at any one time and the 3rd as an active standby, suddenly the number of maintenance visits to replace fans and failing disc drives reduced considerably. Part of this may have been because during the work we discovered one of their team had drilled a hole through the data center floor from below but never admitted it so we had been cycling concrete dust through the DC for 18 months. They managed their final bit of sabotage though. The agreement had been that the old chiller on the roof of the building would be removed by crane and the new chiller installed on the existing steel work with new piping. This work was to take place when I was on holiday for 2 weeks. When I returned I found the chillers installed at ground level on a new concrete pad at the side of the car park, literally at the end of 2 parking spaces, but it was OK as they had "put cones out" I was incandescent and insisted on proper crash barriers rated to prevent a large van driving through them were installed and an enclosure built. They actually put acceptable barriers in all the way around but built a cage around the chillers with a wire roof, this provided a warm place to sleep for a couple of homeless people for a few days that winter, they obviously had a good time as we would find empty vodka bottled beside the cage most mornings. The combination of their lack of interest in providing a decent service, incompetence and sheer arrogance made me hate working with them, they also insisted in retaining a legacy door access system with its own wiring which would occasionally fail to allow doors to open at the far end of the building, Claiming it couldn't use our network wiring as it was 'special' and that our maintainers could not support the equipment as 'all the internals were 'proprietary tech' they would bitch about the cost of replacing a hard drive in the machine every few months but when the supplier suddenly couldn't source a 'proprietary disk' they finally let us open the box and we found a standard Western Digital 20 GB drive installed with a proprietary interface card connecting that to the motherboard. Sure enough we delved into our legacy spares cupboard and found a compatible, used, disk drive and fitted it and all was well. Up until that pint they had paid £1000 per time to have the drives swapped out, these disks had never cost us more than £200 even when they had been leading edge technology.

Or even without an inspection of the area to be worked on first? This line rang alarm bells for me:

" revealed a lattice of cinder blocks above the datacenter, rather than the expected pleasingly solid slab of concrete "

How much effort would it have taken to lift a ceiling tile and take a look at the state of the actual ceiling before deciding what work needed doing?

Since when does management bother about checking the existing situation before making its edicts ?

At my university, a couple of departments were located outside the campus for roughly 15 years, from the founding of these departments til the campus expansion that created room for these departments.

Due to the geographic separation (couple of kilometers), these departments ran their own infrastructure (mail-, file, licence-, simulationservers any much more).

The new building of the campus expansion that was allotted to these departments was an architect-designed marvel. However, no one from those departments was actually involved in the planning of the building. So it came down to: take what the architect designed, there's no option to leave it.

A lot of the infrastructure was relocated to the new location. Technically, that was not necessary anymore because they were now on the campus and could have handed everything over to central campus IT. However, first the professors didn't like to change their ways, and secondly relocating everything was a big enough task, so migrating stuff to central campus IT was defered for later.

In many related departments, a small room without air conditioning was chosen as the "server room", since server racks are easy to cram into a small room, and room itself wasn't overly plentiful.

As it happens in a hot summer, servers would occasionally power down due to excessive heat within the "server room".

A friend of mine even had a stash of old PCs, just to keep parts of the non-migrated servers alive. The email server, which was solely used by the prof was among those things. The plebs had to migrate their email to the servers of central campus IT.

Hence, he troubleshot a problem of a mis-jumpered HDD in an era, when setting HDD jumpers for master/slave was long a thing of the past.

This friend is a wizard in terms of keeping this stuff running, I call him an IT-archeologist rather than an IT admin. Cheers.

-> Where's the bloody jumper.

Whenever I hear tales of campus IT I'm reminded of KCL* where the outage of the central IT lost - permanently IIRC - large amounts of user data. Users who had made their own arrangements for data storage would, I assume, have been OK. After everything had been restored i was reported that in future users should store data centrally. I assume the message would have been received as "We didn't lose your data last time. You have to give us a better chance now."

* My initial IT experience was as a user in a University so I always view campus IT from a user's PoV and that goes double for KCL as that had been my original college some years earlier.

Bringing these kinds of details to manglement before a project, only to have manglement decide it wasn't an issue until someone from the company contracted to do the actual work says the same flippin' thing as you said, and refuses to start work until a new plan is hatched.

Reminds me of the time building renovation was being done above a machine room. Concrete floor - but no-one had thought to seal the gaps between the slabs. I come into a machine room with rather neat square outlines in dust of the slabs in the ceiling. Above disks and tape drives. The management response was to send in people with hoovers and that was it. Work continued, as did the problem.

Not long after the tape drives started to have issues. Due to the suddenly high volume of failures, the manufacturer was brought in. You can pretty much guess the rest (the report contained a sample from the tape cabinet - basically a piece of tape that was used to pick up what was lying in the cabinet. It was so filthy they couldn't stick it to anything)!

The new building of the campus expansion that was allotted to these departments was an architect-designed marvel. However, no one from those departments was actually involved in the planning of the building.

I've been involved in a few new build projects, IT are never allowed on site until first fix is completed so we al;ways have the same issue how am I going to get cables between floors, where can I put my network trunking in that 2 inch false sealing and the current favorite why are their no power outlets in that hot desking / cafe area and why is there nowhere for me to put a wifi access point there when its will be the busiest place in the whole building as people vising HQ will obviously work there before and after meetings.

My most recent though were a deign which meant 'for aesthetic reasons' we had to mount the wi fi access points on top of cable trays in the false ceiling as they had not allowed space for them to hang below, this resulted in holes being cut into the tiles later so they could be mounted blow the trays and actually provide coverage, and the clown who specified a sealed 'clock tower'. The Clock Tower was a nice feature on top of the air vent from the DC cooling, the system ran fine for 48 hours until the backwash of super heated air closed down the air con units. apparently the spec on the vents at the top of the tower had been changed to stop pigeons nesting in there. Almost all these issues lead to significant cost increases for the IT solution, whether it was unexpectedly providing fibre interlinks between floors (not a bad design decision bit there was no budget for it), more wifi repeaters to provide coverage because signals were inhibited by decorative features, or expensive retro fitting and redecoration because the requirement to provide wires to desks had never been considered in the first place.

I remember that a brand new building had to be modified once. The architect had put the generator exhaust at a height that was just about right to pump diesel exhaust into the windows of the business next door. No-one seemed to realise until we had a power failure on a hot day when their windows were open - about 20 minutes after the generator started there was chaos - alarms going off and people coming out of their office.

The exhaust stack had to be re-designed.

Fun times.

And implied in TFA, multiple cinder block floors above that?

Where is that considered good building practice? Is it actually to code anywhere? In my travels I've seen a lot of dodgy buildings, but this one is new to me.

Is it actually to code anywhere?

Quite. It makes me wonder what the floors were made of, with all that implies about floor loading.

One company I worked at used a converted bus depot as a data centre. One nicht, the director was called out of bed, during a heavy rain storm, the whole roof had collapsed, falling on the data centre and, naturally, rain as well.

I've been in data centres (yes Highways Agency, I'm looking at you) where they actually had ducts (OK, drain pipes) to channel water away from the servers into a bucket.