SRCF Hosting
Hosting equipment at the SRCF
Hosting space at the SRCF is available to researchers on campus for no hosting fee. We do want dense and full racks, when ever possible, and we have a policy of no equipment more then 5 years old. Both of these are in place to best use the facility's design. Campus faculty and staff can have 24x7 access to SLAC and the SRCF. If you have contractors involved, they will only have access to SLAC 6am-6pm M-F. They can be escorted in at other times by any faculty or staff with a SLAC and SRCF badge.
There are some one time costs that the researcher bears. No racks are provided, researcher provided racks need to be four post racks with front and back doors and side panels. We like the APC model 3150 for most deployments that don't require deep storage arrays. These run about $1550, all in, from Dell's SmartMart site.
Here is a link to the suggested APC racks and where you might order them. It shows three racks, the 3350, 3150 and the 3100. We think the 3150 is the best for the SRCF to allow adequate room to work in the rack.
Next, a particular voltage PDU is needed. Each rack is provided a 415VAC 3Phase L22-30 receptacle. The recommended Raritan PDU connects to that receptacle and provides 42 C13 receptacles and 6 C19 receptacles, 240VAC, single phase is provided to these outlets. There are several PDUs that meet this criteria, the recommended one has a longer whip cord plug, 5M, instead of the standard 3M. This PDU runs about $1250 all in.
Here is a link to a PDF of a quote for the PDU, the first on on the quote is what you'll need. The vendor has these in stock and provide very quick delivery.
Lastly, the researcher is responsible for the network switch. Each researcher deployment is provided with two 10g uplink connections, in LACP mode, to provide 20g options and automatic fail over to 10g in case of a problem with networking. Additional capacity is available if there is a clear demand.
If you are associated with the School of Medicine, they will provide a switch, at no additional charge. The switch is a Cisco 48 port 1g switch with four 10g SFP+ ports. Two of the 10g ports would be for the uplink to the building switch, leaving two 10g SFP+ ports for use in the rack. Multiple racks get you multiple switches, but only one pair of uplinks. The switches would be chained together then so you'd still only have two 10g SFP+ ports but a whole lot of 1g ports. If many 10g ports are required, the SOM/IRT/ITS networking team does offer a larger 10g switch with 24 or 48 10g ports for a monthly rate of $260/mo. (No researcher has taken this offering yet, so that is why I don't know the number of 10g ports available. Happy to research if that is of interest.)
If you aren't associated with the School of Medicine, you can purchase your own switch for use in the setup. It could be 1g or 10g, based on your needs. (If you are associated with the SOM, you can't opt to purchase your own switch, they need the management options so they need to specify the switch, which is why the default model is provided at no charge and a reasonable deal on the 10g switch is offered.)
The criteria for a purchased switch are that it needs at least two SFP+ 10g ports for uplink and that it must LACP with Cisco equipment. We have some recommended switches we can suggest that work. If you have a special model switch you'd like to use, and it isn't one we've worked on before, you'll be taking the responsibility of working out the LACP configuration with the Cisco switch on your own.
In terms of VLAN management, any of the campus routed VLANs can be made to appear at the SRCF or a new network space from the SRCF routers can be offered. There are also options for dark fiber if really needed for your application.
With a either a SOM provided switch or a switch you'd provide, we can help get the VLANs trunked on the uplink ports.
To help with this please try to fill out the following form, indicating the type of connections you'd want.
Once the switch is up and connected to the backbone, then you are responsible for allocating VLANs out to the particular ports needed, within the TOR switches configuration.
Moving and installing the equipment in the rack is your responsibility. We can offer a few Moving contractors that we've worked with if interested, just drop Scott Prevost, sprevost@stanford.edu or Phil Reese, preese@stanford.edu a note.
For anything that needs to be shipped to the facility please use this template address, filled out with appropriate information, of course:
(Researcher’s name) -- bldg 054
Stanford Research Computing Facility (SRCF)
2575 Sand Hill Rd
Menlo Park, CA 94025-7015
Attn: (Researcher's name) Scott 650-995-4398
(NOTE: SLAC’s Receiving dock is open 7-4pm M-F ONLY. Deliveries outside of these times will need to be rescheduled for a time in this range.