Planning the new Home Office (7.0 beta)

In the past few months I’ve been asked several times what my new planned Home Office will look like, whether I plan to take any pictures, and if I already know what hardware will be running in the new Office. The short answer is; yes. I will be posting pictures as stuff arrives, will be writing posts and reviews when it makes sense to do so, and I will be creating the new Home Office 7.0 pages in the process. However, this time around it’ll be a bit more of a dragged out process. Because of logistics, international transport, timing, and really a TON of other practical details I will be splitting the full build of the new office into 3 stages.

The first stage is to get the electricity and power requirements sorted and made available and to furnish the new office with plenty of desk space. Then I’ll be adding the first new bits of hardware to it, for the time being a small server, a big PC workstation, and about the biggest baddest Mac Pro money can buy (12-core, 64GB RAM, 2 x 480GB SSD, 4 x 3TB RAID10 HD’s, 12TB external RAID5 storage).

Confused? Surprised? More Apple stuff? Yes, more Apple stuff, you read that correctly. The first stage will also require some 1500VA UPS’es, metered power distribution, a fresh 24-port gigabit switch, and for starters 3 fresh 30″ Dell UltraSharp monitors that will form the new main “work area”.

There is, of course, a lot more involved but specs on the hardware are still being adjusted based on requirement projections and I have not yet decided on a preferred vendor for who gets to supply me the new custom servers and workstations. Because I like to do business locally when possible and need a professional place that actually not only understands what they’re required to build but will provide top notch warranty and service it’s an on-going search and decisions are “pending”.

You can imagine, I bet, that any vendor would be more than happy and roll out the red carpet for a customer like myself who burns through more hardware than a QE lab does. Well, not quite that much but… substantial enough.

If you know of any professional kick-ass custom system builders in the San Francisco Bay Area who could build the kind of systems you’ve come to expect of me, let me know by e-mail stefan at (the domain you’re looking at).

The other thing to expect from the new office is a lot more LED lighting around the desk surfaces at the back and in “strategic” places (mostly to accentuate things a little bit and create a fitting “mood” that will match the glow of the monitors).

Once the first stage is completed and while I wait for other practical issues to be dealt with this will be the temporary setup I’ll be working with. After that stage two will require the transport of the current Home Office 6.0 (I’m not going to be shipping everything, though, just all the big stuff). Systems will be given a new purpose and different tasks and integrated with the temporary result of stage one. At that point it probably will look a lot like the current plan:

The current six 24″ screens are integrated, the iMac gets integrated near the main 3 x 30″ monitor area, and the real fun of velcro and cable management will probably take me a few days to deal with. Depending on yet more practical matters this stage 2 result will remain like that until space for expansion is available. The exact details on how that will look are unclear at this time but I have some ideas. I always have some ideas. I’m not posting them here because I get accused of “going overkill” so I certainly wouldn’t want to show anyone what real overkill might look like! 🙂

The real “nice” photos will have to wait until stage 2 has completed because all my camera gear will travel with me as carry-on when I fly back and forth to arrange the international transport of the office. Until that time I’ll have to work with considerably less in terms of cameras and lenses.