My Opera News

The shipping crate

The day has finally arrived. After weeks and weeks of utter frustration over and babysitting our current database solution, the new one arrives in all its cardboard glory. Inside this box, we have our brand spanking new Dell PowerEdge 6850. Some people may call this "entry level", but we call it hardware nirvana, and we are very excited about the possibilities it opens up, both in terms of other liberated servers now used for databases but also the performance benefits this will yield.

The front of the 4U housing

As I mentioned above, the last 5 or 6 weeks have been truly frustrating for us here in the HQ. We suddenly reached a point where our current database cluster solution could no longer cope with the traffic it was expected to handle. At all. We had been aware of the fact that the database backend needed a hardware redesign in the somewhat near future, however, we didn't expect it now, and we didn't expect it without any prior warning. Luckily we had been discussing the problem a bit some weeks prior, and knew what action to take.

RAM

So we've had some weeks where babysitting our database servers have taken most of our work days, eating into time which should be spent maintaining current features, getting rid of bugs and developing new features for the Opera Community. A lot of handholding had to be done, and some creative reconfiguration so that we could get the most out of our current cluster solution.

Since we are now moving to a monolithic solution from a cluster solution, we need some proper hardware to deal with our traffic. Specs are as follows:

CPU array

• Four Intel Dual Core Xeon 7030 2.8GHz CPUs
• 8GB of 400MHz Single Rank DDR2 memory, with plenty of room for more
• Four 15,000RPM SAS disks

Turbines!

Disks

Information panel

For your, I'm sure, unfathomable pleasure, we include some video footage of us firing up our new deity for the first time (all files have the same content, but are in different formats): in MPEG1 (mpg) in QuickTime (mov) in RealMedia (rm)