Staff file, personnel department

Ellis, RHCE

Red Hat Certified Ellis. Senior Thermal Engineer, Head of Hardware Burn-in, and the only engineer we ever had who was paid entirely in warm servers.

Ellis at his desk, on duty, with a monitor behind him

Personnel file

Name: Ellis
Role: Senior Thermal Engineer and Head of Hardware Burn-in
Certification: RHCE (Red Hat Certified Ellis)
Uniform: Custom knitwear, seasonal colours, never optional
Preferred workstation: Top of the rack, exhaust side
Specialities: Burn-in supervision, thermal testing, client escalations
Favourite days: Burn-in days
Clearance: Every room, every rack, every bench. Nobody ever asked.

Quality Control, Thermal Division

Every new server that came through the lab got a burn-in: disks wiped and certified with Blancco, memory tested for days on end, every fan spun up to full. To us it was procedure. To Ellis it was the best day of the week, because a rack of servers under load is the warmest place in any building, and a Sphynx always knows exactly where the heat is.

He took the job seriously. He arrived before the first machine powered on and stayed until the last one passed. His method never changed: climb to the top of the rack, find the exhaust, sit down, supervise. A server running warm got his undivided attention for hours. A server running cool got a long look of mild disappointment.

He kept standards of his own. Fan noise was acceptable. Silence was suspicious. A machine that finished its memory test early was inspected twice, personally. Cables were checked by paw. Anything left open on the bench was assumed to be a bed.

In all his years on the job, not one machine left the lab without his sign-off. Most of them were signed off with a nap.

Case files

Ellis, a Sphynx cat in a red knit jumper, standing on top of a server rack — Final inspection. Nothing left the lab without his sign-off.

Ellis in a red jumper, peering over the top of a rack of running servers — Supervising a burn-in from the warmest seat in the building.

Ellis sitting inside a rack among servers, lit by blue status lights — Hands-on verification. He always preferred the exhaust side.

Ellis in a yellow jumper, sitting on top of a stack of storage servers — Quality control on a fresh batch of storage servers.

Ellis in a knitted bed wearing a blue striped jumper, looking unimpressed — Mandatory rest period between burn-ins. He did not agree with the policy.

Client care

Ellis took care of our clients the way a senior engineer does: personally, and without being asked. New hardware was inspected before it went into service. Escalations were reviewed in person, usually from the top of the rack. Late nights in the lab were never spent alone. If a machine was going to a client, it had been warmed, watched and approved by the most thorough engineer we ever had.

Ellis was with us until April 2024.
We still test every server as if he were watching.