As part of our annual CAPEX round, we were able to upgrade the satellite emulator server (sats-em), which as the heart of the original machines was one of the oldest CPUs on the block. Seeing that the disk on our existing storage server was nearing capacity, we also invested in two large NAS storage servers with almost 200 TB raided capacity combined. Each experiment generates between about 40 MB and 1.2 GB worth of data, and we can run almost 100 experiments per day when the going is good. The upgrade coincided with the annual electrical inspection of the simulator (which required over 200 power cables, power boards, power distributors and any mains-powered devices to be safety inspected). While we passed the inspection with flying colours, we’re now having to ensure that the sparky reconnected everything correctly – in particular our network cables… fun in the dark of the cabinets!