Political Power Play Poses Problems

I was doing some work for a company that doesn't exist anymore, racking servers in their data center. In the same city, there were a few satellite offices, but I didn't usually visit them because they didn't have data centers. One of the satellite offices, though, housed a department that had some pull within the company as well as some (somewhat poorly) justified security concerns. They decided that they couldn't possibly have their precious data housed in the main data center all the way across town, so they needed their servers in their main office. This wasn't a data center, just a fairly secure room in an office building - a room that also housed their cube farm. They were warned that this was a bad idea by everyone from my level up through several layers of management, but apparently they had enough pull (and enough hubris) to plot their own course on this question. They had redundant 240V circuits pulled to a little alcove, a server rack installed, special network circuits and switches, and a couple of servers (probably Proliant DL380 G3s or similar - my memory is hazy on this) delivered. My job was to go unbox everything, assemble the servers, get them installed in the rack, and get the OS installed. So off I trotted. I got a visitor badge and an escort into the secure area, and I merrily began setting things up. By this point, I had built a few hundred of these machines, so it was a cakewalk. Soon, the machines were up and humming. I gave a status update to the manager, took out my trash, and headed back to the data center. Not long after, I got a call from that same manager: "Are the servers supposed to be this loud?" Well, yeah. Especially when you put them in just an office. They have to have airflow to keep cool. Those fans are howling because that's what they are trying to do. You cram a couple of Xeons and six 10,000 RPM SCSI drives into a 2U box, and it's going to make some noise. And you have two of those in that rack, so yeah. Operating as designed. By the way, your office may get a little warm from the waste heat - you might want to talk to the facilities people to be sure the HVAC is working well in that area, including overnights and on the weekends. Honestly, that's why data centers exist.