Both. It’s a lot of electrical work, hvac work (think ducting, plumbing, more electric). Tons of concrete work.
Once you have one working design for the environment (e.g. hot desert vs cold and humid), you can stamp the things out with minimal variation between the two.
The maintenance of all of that supporting infrastructure is the standard blue collar work the same.
The only new blue collar job on the maintenance side is responding to hardware issues. What this entails depends on if it’s a colo center and you’re doing “remote hands” for a customer where you’re swapping a PSU, RAM, or whatever. You also install new servers, switches, etc.
As you move up into hyperscalers the logistics vary because some designs make servicing a single server in place not worth cooling the whole hot aisle (Google runs really hot hot aisles that weren’t human friendly). So sometimes you just yank the server and throw it in a cart or wait for the whole rack to fail and pull it then.
Overall though, anything that can be done remotely is. So the data center techs do very little work on the keyboard
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Both. It’s a lot of electrical work, hvac work (think ducting, plumbing, more electric). Tons of concrete work.
Once you have one working design for the environment (e.g. hot desert vs cold and humid), you can stamp the things out with minimal variation between the two.
The maintenance of all of that supporting infrastructure is the standard blue collar work the same.
The only new blue collar job on the maintenance side is responding to hardware issues. What this entails depends on if it’s a colo center and you’re doing “remote hands” for a customer where you’re swapping a PSU, RAM, or whatever. You also install new servers, switches, etc.
As you move up into hyperscalers the logistics vary because some designs make servicing a single server in place not worth cooling the whole hot aisle (Google runs really hot hot aisles that weren’t human friendly). So sometimes you just yank the server and throw it in a cart or wait for the whole rack to fail and pull it then.
Overall though, anything that can be done remotely is. So the data center techs do very little work on the keyboard