I've spent time in dozens ... maybe hundreds of server closets in academia/companies that have been around for a few decades, and this is easily on the very, very clean side. When there are no rewards for cleaning up and every reason not to mess with something that works, little tends to be done on the aesthetic side. Ask me sometime about the server closet for a group that aggregated hundreds of remote telemetry sensors... by per-sensor dedicated copper lines that had been around since the 70s.

It's also very typical for machine rooms in academia in my experience (the MIT AI Lab had one that looked far worse than this, and others in the same building were similar). [Well, minus the wooden beams, but aside from that...]

Business are typically a little better (IME), as they tend to have a bit more money, but sometimes barely. Once you get to giant Google-scale outfits, of course, the game changes completely...

That's nothing.

I went in a BIG well known UK hosting company DC (which we colo'ed in) back in 2003 and they had racks of machines sitting on top of books on the bottom of comms racks rather than proper racks. We had to get a DL380 out from underneath a pile of 5 others. Not as easy as it sounded.

Cables everywhere. Power cables taped to everything. Total mess.

OpenBSD one is bliss.

It's Theo's basement.