Just a quick update on getting our office setup. In the last post on Building our Rigs, we were still in Chris Spagnuolo's house. We have since moved into our "temporary" space while our final home is being built-out (more on that as the plans get finalized and construction starts!)

So let's take a look around. As I noted before, we all have 3 monitor setups. It's as good as you'd think. The workstation itself seems really fast, and the other guys have been really happy with the performance while developing. I've been traveling and setting up servers and the network so I'll report back when I've had a chance to really beat on it.

As you can see I'm currently rocking the Home Depot desk. We're still waiting for our Ikea desks to arrive, but a sheet of plywood and some sawhorses work quite well.  Since we went with the very economical Ikea desks we could afford Herman Miller Mirra chairs. Besides being a little less expensive than the Aeron, these are 96% recyclable. We gave these a test run at Rally when we visited them a while back.

Speaking of recycling, setting up an office generates an awful pile of waste from the packaging. We're trying to recycle what we can, but these two bags are full of Styrofoam and other non-recyclable plastics. This pile is just from the packaging for the chairs, the printer and some other misc office supplies.

We have been able to put some of the cardboard boxes to some good use...

We'll get a rack once we move to the new space, but for now our servers have to make do with what we've got. Speaking of servers, we got Dell PowerEdge's with Xeon LV chips - they are supposed to use significantly less power than the standard Xeon chips. We are running 3 physical machines for now.

Our the File Server / Domain Controller and the SQL / Oracle servers have a single Quad Core Xeon CPU, and ~500GB RAID5.

Our App Server has two Quad Core Xeons, 8GB Ram, and two 15k disks. We'll be running AGS and IMS on the base OS, and other stuff as needed in VMs.

We just barely got them up and running last week, but I can say this - they be FAST. And just disregard that tangled mess that is supposed to pass for a "built in networking panel". We''ll be keeping an eye on whoever is wiring up the new space for us, and ensure that we get a patch panel rather than another one of these!

Our server room also does double duty as a separated recycling storage area. Separating this stuff before you take it to the recycling center makes it so much easier.

So that's about it for now. After the new year we'll be getting a serious firewall so we can start hosting demo sites, and other fun stuff. Construction build out will start mid-January.