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Behind the scenes at the Opera community

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Hardware!

Posted by olekasper · Tags:

the box
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 housing
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
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
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
We are going to feed it our favourite flavour of Linux, install MySQL and have it available for testing on a publicly available server in hopefully a couple of weeks. Hope to see you then. We need help hammering it. :happy:
fæns
Turbines!
disks
Disks
info panel
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)

Wish listOne year anniversary

Comments

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WOW :D

That was Norwegian, right ? Subtitles pending ?

By dantesoft, # 5. September 2006, 10:42:40

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haha, well, I can assure you that nothing intersting is being said :smile:

By olekasper, # 5. September 2006, 10:53:07

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Who are the 2 unusual suspects, then ? :smile:

By dantesoft, # 5. September 2006, 10:57:16

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One of the sysadmins and one other guy from our department :smile:

By willosof, # 5. September 2006, 12:59:33

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Server porn :D

By velmu, # 5. September 2006, 15:38:35

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TRYKK PÅ KNAPPEN DA!!!!!

By dan1el, # 5. September 2006, 18:23:54

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SWEET!

By klingoncowboy4, # 6. September 2006, 03:26:34

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Whew... Servers Gone Wild p:

By link0, # 6. September 2006, 06:01:36

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Which Linux distro? :smile:

By robodesign, # 6. September 2006, 10:24:02

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Good Server
:up:

By mark_poleon, # 7. September 2006, 02:36:57

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Which Linux distro?

Debian. Of course! p:

By olekasper, # 7. September 2006, 10:43:46

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Which Debian? or ... which Debian-based distro?

By robodesign, # 7. September 2006, 11:25:17

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Debian Sarge, thoroughly tested and stable. :smile:

By vetler, # 7. September 2006, 20:56:38

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Actually, they added another 8 GB of RAM! BTW, thanks for quoting me dan1el! :yes:

By kjetilk, # 8. September 2006, 12:50:05

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bah. bloody impatient people! I was merely making sure Sverre had connected the screen! P:

By olekasper, # 8. September 2006, 16:39:03

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Nice.
Can we load the old forum software on it:left::right:
seriously, this is a big step up :yes:

By salmondine, # 9. September 2006, 16:39:46

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:hat:


:cheers:


:yes:

By wickedlizard, # 16. September 2006, 09:55:33

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:eyes: :whistle:

Serious piece of kit. Hope it's the solution.

By Mickeyjoe_irl, # 16. September 2006, 12:05:00

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Congratulation :hat:

(Early Christmas Eve this year?) :D

By leirom, # 26. September 2006, 23:58:04

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Any sign of it going online?

By Mickeyjoe_irl, # 27. September 2006, 19:41:44

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Yeah, watch for when the monkeys quiet down :wink:

By dantesoft, # 27. September 2006, 19:54:14

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I love DEll!

By cnidc, # 5. October 2006, 09:34:09

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We too! Or, we'll see.. :wink:

By olekasper, # 10. October 2006, 08:17:07

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:whistle:
:drool:
I love hardware.

By drlaunch, # 30. October 2006, 15:11:02

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Whoo!

Will this fix the :devil: proxy error?

By aleksanteri, # 30. October 2006, 19:21:33

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:cheers:

Thanks guys. :D

By angel292005, # 30. October 2006, 21:26:47

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with comparsion to my own notebook, I am definitely down....

By cloudssunshine, # 30. October 2006, 21:52:03

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TACK MORSKE NORSKE GUTTER ! EQ OPERA MINI E FUCK ING SPLEENDED STAT OF DA ARTE ! JA HAR ANNVÄNT MINI I CA 6 MÅN ALLDRIG NÄSTAN NGT PROOBLEEM ! BARA AHLA E FEL O FRI ! WIMDOWS JA JA SÄJA BARE DE! FRÅN ALF G.UTARNAS Ö O ROMAS SKVLANDE
JA F VA VI DE ! OMÅTTLIG STÅLT ! KOM HIT SÅ SETTA VI NETEN I SJÖEN ETA FLUNDRAR ! GO DAGAR PA EIR ! SUCSEESS AND BLEES NN YAA ! MVH ALF . alfmurman@yahoo.co

By alfmurman, # 30. October 2006, 21:56:16

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おめでとうございます。
サーバー交換中の表示を見たときには一瞬目を疑いましたが、スムーズに復活したようで一安心しました。
これからもよろしくお願いします。

By itochan, # 31. October 2006, 13:24:52

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Look at the rear on that beauty; isn't she a hot one. :wink:

PST MORE PIX PLZ!!!

By coxy, # 31. October 2006, 13:45:04

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Congratulations! Best wishes on happy expansions!

By WNelWeb, # 1. November 2006, 02:04:40

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We are going to feed it our favourite flavour of Linux

Please feed my curiosity, what is your favourite flavour of Linux? :smile:

By danielcs, # 1. November 2006, 06:10:11

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Why do I get a 502 Server Error when I attempt to see the comments on this post?

Usually, you can refresh a few times and its sorted itself out - but it's been like that all day.

By coxy, # 3. November 2006, 23:23:26

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I got an error too. Looks like someone needs to smack the server around a bit.

(By the way, their favourlite Linux distro is probably Debian.)

By haavard, # 3. November 2006, 23:51:46

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How u all

By baqirhss, # 7. November 2006, 06:56:27

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