I love reading about StackOverflow, particularly their infrastructure.<p>The site has been a useful resource for so many years, and it works so well. It was a joy to discover that it all ran on like two racks worth of servers, and still does. Having seen corporate intranet portals, with maybe a thousand daily active users, running on excessive* hardware (needlessly, of course), it's like a breath of fresh air.<p>*EDIT: Removed hyperbole. Not more hardware, but too much nonetheless.
Woah, the datacenter you guys moved to is across the street from my apartment. Just a heads up, I considered it for a project myself but ruled it out because... well this is the back corner of that building:
<a href="http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqnh988WRS1qzpdb2o4_1280.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqnh988WRS1qzpdb2o4_1280.j...</a>
That's a really nice cabling job. I've inherited 2 DC's with just-awful-enough cabling that I'd be exceptionally happy to set up new racks again and migrate, just to <i>sort the bloody cables out</i><p>Sigh, don't think it's gonna happen.<p>As a customer of Dell, it was interesting to see someone elses insight on managing a dell farm.<p>So neat! I am mildly envious! ;)
> We learned that accidentally sticking a server with nothing but naked IIS into rotation is really bad. Sorry about that one.<p>Wait, does that mean what I think it means? Did someone get an IIS splash page when visiting SO?<p>I was going to say they should live-blog during their next upgrade but it they did it on twitter which is awesome.
I think what impressed me most was the power density that data center is supporting. That looks like nearly 10kW of power in a single rack! Many providers top out at 4kW and HE2 in Fremont was just 1.8kW per rack when I was there.
<i>Most companies depreciate hardware across 3 years</i><p>Can somebody explain why exactly? Was there ever some large scale research with the outcome this was somehow the cheapest? Or is it a mere byproduct of the consumption-based society?
I'm asking because I'ved used lots of different types of hardware (both computing and non-computing) and >90% lasted <i>well</i> over 3 years. It seems a waste of time/money to get rid of ot after 3 years? Which matches with SE's findings: they choose 4 years. Still not that much, but already 'better'