Whenever people visit my office or see my workspace, they are always amazed by the sheer number of screens.  The next question/statement is usually “what the heck do you need all those screens for”, or “you can’t look at more than one screen at a time”.

I’m not going to go into the awesomeness of multiple screens, but talk a little about how I have things setup.  To be honest, this is a reduction in screens for me, heres a pic from a previous office setup (theres actually another 3 screens on the left of me which you can’t see in that picture).

Anyway, the current setup, starting from the far left.

This is an XP machine, which I use mainly for Forex trading.  Although I prefer to work on OSX, and I know I could run this as a virtual machine, its just not the same experience, regardless of what any “tech gurus” might say – simply, they are disagreeing with me, and by default, wrong.  Kidding of course

When I sit in in “trading mode” on this machine, MetaTrader takes up both screens.  When not actively trading, I leave woopra.com up and running.  For those of you that haven’t seen woopra; its a real time website visitor analytics tool.  It displays visitor info/metrics in real time, including where in the world they are – which it maps (being a little boy inside, I find this very cool!).  At the time I’m writing this post, I can see there are 8 visitors viewing the zovo.co website, and which countries they are in, queue some sort of cheesy world domination music here.

The last screen on the XP machine runs Bloomberg TV, which occasionally gets muted, if you’ve ever watched Bloomberg TV, you’ll know why!  Another excellent web app is used here, check out zattoo.com, which lets you watch live TV channels.  Unfortunately the BBC feeds have been pulled now, but Bloomberg TV is there (which save me getting a Freeview TV in here).

Coming round to my much loved Macbook, running an Apple LED display (mini DVI straight off the macbook), and a Samsung LED (BX2350), running on an ezCap USB to DVI adaptor.

I do most of my browsing, document editing, chatting, etc on here.  The macbook screen gets used mainly for instant messaging and viewing youtube/ted.com etc.  The Samsung LED (on the far right) has all of my social media feeds via, Twitter OSX app, and TweetDeck as well as NewsBar (lightweight, no nonsense RSS feed reader).

Tell me about your desk/workspace, and feel free to ask any questions.  Usually a mention to @hamlesh on twitter will get a quicker response.

» Read more: A look at my desk

Here’s a sneak peak at the server / comms room setup I have at home. It evolves over time with new servers being put in as part of my personal test lab, but every once in a while I shut everything down, pull everything out, including power/network cables and redeploy. An evolving server room will always get messy over time, this is inevitable.

Be warned, this might be very geeky/techy for some of you, but I find it cool, and wanted to document/talk about it

Going from top down;

Tv.drobo

4 bay USB2 drobo unit, currently running 2x 2Tb and 2x 1Tb drives. It’s a first generation drobo, thus only supports USB2, and max 2Tb drives, hopefully drobo will release firmware to support larger drives in the future. Once 2Tb drives drop below the £50 mark per drive (inc vat and delivery), or when I run out of space, I’ll replace the 2x 1Tb drives. This unit holds all of my TV episodes and shows, hence it’s name.

Dell PowerConnect

24 port gigabit switch, not much more I can say, it’s managed and very good in a “non ISP” environment. Not sure if I’d use one in the data centre though, other than perhaps as a storage network switch (supports multiple bonded port groups, and jumbo frames, with a 10Gpbs backplane).

Ironhide

Netgear ReadyNAS, with 4x 250Gb drives, holds all of my music. The main reason I still use the ReadyNAS is that it has squeezebox server built in as part of it’s base operating system. I have two jogglers (little openpeak photo frame tablet things) around the house, running jolicloud, with squeezecentre on them. So this setup for music “just works”, which is all I care about; for music anyway, throughput isn’t critical. If I needed to I could bond the network interfaces, but there’s really no need for that!

Allspark

1Tb Lacie Etherdisk (4x 250Gb) running Debian, this spends most of it’s time powered down, I only fire it up when I need it. It’s on a separate storage VLAN, and I use it as an NFS based datastore when I need to move virtual machines between different vmware ESXi servers.

Bonecrusher

1Tb Lacie Etherdisk (4x 250Gb) running Debian. This runs hellanzb and hellavcr, which knows what TV shows I follow, and grabs them when they are available (in the formats I like, ie hidef). Not going to go into too much depth on how these are setup, google, or ask me on twitter (@hamlesh) and I’ll tell you

Soundwave

Dell Poweredge SC1425, my primary vmware ESXi server, running various things, perhaps I’ll do another post about the virtual machines at some point. There’s usually another SC1425 (ESXi) called Optimus underneath this server, but at the time this picture was taken Optimus is in the office.

Sideswipe

Dell Poweredge 1800, my primary storage control server, and the central point for media sharing across the network. It also has some internal storage, about 4Tb worth, used when I need to move large amounts of data around.

Apple Xserve RAID

Multiple arrays deployed on this, mirrored for documents storage, two large arrays for movie and software storage. The throughput of these units is really something else, I need to put up the disk bench stats at some point. Having 14 spindles and fibre channel access (4 Gbps) is really something else, but some could argue, it overkill for a home setup

I would like to get a pic when the xserve is working really hard, as all the blue indicator lights on the front are really quite mesmerising

Cabling is currently relatively neat, I have serious OCD when it comes to cabling neatness, still need to velcro tie the cables

The Xserve RAID is running fibre channel to the storage server (Sideswipe), which has bonded gigabit onto the network (bonded ports on the switch too obviously).

There are some other machines missing in these pics, all that are used for various virtualisation testing etc, but they are currently with clients doing proof on concept delivery, or being borrowed by friends.

Everything is running on an APC remote reboot unit, so I can power cycle anything remotely, or usually when I’m feeling too lazy to go downstairs. I’ll have to do another post on my power provision at some point too. Ive built a custom distribution unit which can be switched between the mains, or a little petrol generator thats sitting in the garden (just outside the comms room)… Yep I have power backup / generator capacity for all of this kit at home

In total I probably have around 24Tb of storage running in this setup, all of which is backed up on zovo, who provide unlimited storage online backup. With everything running, this setup uses just under 4 amps (thanks to power metering on the APC power bar).

Anyway, hope this has been informative, why not comment and tell me about your setup?