You know someone is a real hardware guy when he calls backup, monitoring and logging non essential. Also a bit confused about the 2960Ss and the choice of Cisco in general. I'd never thought Stack Overflow ran on Network Equipment, what I'd describe as consumer hardware in networking.
This is serious Server HW porn. Thanks for sharing! Would love to know more information about your bandwidth usage, limits, etc. Also, do you have any closer idea as to how much this would cost in "cloud" services in % terms? (I'm doing general research in Bare Metal & Colocation vs Cloud pricing comparison). Thank you!
Awesome pics; it'd be cool to see some people in them too. Thank you for all the work you're doing for Stack Overflow/Exchange, it's an amazing resource!!
Quite a leap upward from the original: <a href="https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/04/our-dedicated-server/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/04/our-dedicated-server/</a>
How are the drives used on their SQL server boxes? They have a massive NVMe drive on raid 0 with 20 sata drives in raid 10? Which drives are used for prod data? Do they run backups on the same box?
Would love to see details on energy use / cost. Have you done any profiling there? Is energy cost a big deal? Is that the main reason Providence doesn't refresh continuously?
Interestingly, the price of 32GB DDR3 LR-DIMMs has been falling as well. I wonder if this is due to oversupply or something else since 8Gbit DDR3 will never happen on servers.