So blogs are supposed to be places where you share things about yourself with other people. I figured today I would give you a little tour of Building 35, where I work at Microsoft.
This is my little happy office space. I recently had to change offices twice in the space of two weeks. Yes, the view is nice, but I share what used to be a single executive's office with four other people. Here they are, hard at work!
As a lab engineer, a lot of my work is done in our server labs. They don't let just anybody into these inner sanctums of technological wonder: here I'm scanning by badge to get into the lab.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-or-6kAF7Qyw1P73-bmF815ExkSwMYWNUcQBb0NcFKlx7vo3m0POx3aZHYHRgRx4B5GjcKn3GrfU9dzSKqYIzX7oBE9gINtPG03aFfjB5K9s_QB7lFunAUckM1b2Ob5-K7Y0b/s400/IMG_2918.JPG)
And this is what is looks like inside.
Lots and lots of servers. Below is a job that I did a couple of months ago... I installed 40 servers in these racks and cabled them. It may look like a jumbled mess to you, but I assure you it all makes sense.
Today I'm working on storage arrays for these Dell 2950s.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjTqpkLXHeY5v6WBVu2C_Y-ChHS-EdFlGgdhOqhVimkMVmRTuLi-7QUyvjIP_zo0-J7f-eYGfbixmZBdvDtWVYQScsL1ZgQ9naLuz4VYLuSTUMxFlxHXFSt42lL_Xx_6VRQHDh/s400/IMG_2926.JPG)
The thing with the blue light is the storage array. It's basically just an enclosure with a whole bunch of hard drives for storage. In this single array there are fifteen 300 GB hard drives.
If you do the math, that's 4 1/2 TB (terabytes) of storage. (Yeah, that's quite a lot.)
Out in the front lobby we also have another very, very important item that I also spend a lot of time working on:
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHL_yD811-RzBQAvmzdGhSf-aW04vZCNQohq-dfkF_fXmllZcoDKKVn-h3xbNKHb5QJKl_78Yykux6j1Xn5QG1gMkJYWCGaZ8Y7NBiYjZitxjoD61N1Ej_56yhzsh0SK8kt_qd/s400/IMG_2930.JPG)
And you'll never go thirsty when you're on MS campus with all of the free beverages: