Overtaken by events

We’re doing a complete refurbishment of the Unilever server room this summer. The original plan was to move all the servers out by the end of July in order for work to start in August. The room holds three compute clusters and half the servers that provide the Chemistry IT infrastructure, so we’d planned to do this gradually over a period of weeks.
Unfortunately the ageing air conditioning in the room didn’t quite make it to August. It failed last Sunday. Luckily it’s been possible to bring all the refurb work forward by three weeks. So in the last few days we’ve gone from this

to this

to this.

That last server sitting on the trolley has to be moved out of working hours, and will be gone by Monday. The rack to the left is the only thing that will remain in the room, and that’s because it’s supplying all the phones and networking to the Unilever centre.
The servers that came out of the Unilever room have been spread around the department. We’ve moved some less important machines out of the other server rooms to make space for them. Some of the displaced machines have been switched off for the duration (if that affects you then you will have had an email from us) and quite a few others have found a temporary home in a lab that’s awaiting a refurb.

Now all we have to do is move them all back in a month’s time.