
Today was the official opening of the brand spanking new server room on the Opera Software ASA premises. The system administrators were out in full force along with major parts of the Opera Software managment. Obviously, having nothing better to do than eat cake and drink alcohol free champagne, most of the Opera Community team tagged along as well.

Claudia from sysadmin had even made a server room cake. Mmmm. Stein claims it is a world's first in server room cakes. I'll take his word for it.


Anyway, the most interesting thing in the server room, is
of course the Opera Community rack, as seen to the left. From the top, we have user file storage (the content of files.myopera.com), "bigma" (the master MySQL database server which we so proudly have shown you nudie pics of before with its five 15K RPM striped disks in front loading bays), and two IBM blade centers containing multi-purpose machines (Apache front ends, Apache back ends, slave MySQL database servers, load balancers, file servers, cache servers, sync masters and what have you).
Considering how stuff typically goes down every time I try to brag about our new hardware's perfomance, I won't this time. Actually, on the contrary, I must say that files.myopera.com is performing rather poorly at times of heavy load. We'll need to make someone invest in a proper caching front for that one...

Anyway. With the Opera Community as the only in-production system running in the new server room, it was with a bit of trepidation that we watched Jon flip the switch on the fuses to cut the power to the entire server room. Apparently, this is sysadmin's sick joke of an inauguration ritual. Anyway, the UPSes and the 10 tonnes of battery backup somehow worked fine, the diesel generator kicked in, and the Opera Community survived. Even though the 500A relays were making some rather disturbing noises.

Lastly, here's a couple of more pictures of random server room porn; left is my.opera.com's naked behind and the right are containers of argon gas (for extinguishing fires without messing up electronics).