Mmm... Freshly-unboxed servers. There really is nothing better to wake up to in the morning.
Well, okay, coffee. But new servers - definitely second.
In late April, the FreeBSD Foundation generously purchased more machines to keep the FreeBSD.org infrastructure operating smoothly. While the new servers are not yet in production (a task the Cluster Administrators will undertake while at BSDCan in June), we have planned far in advance what we intend to do with the new hardware.
In mid-May, I spent several days at our East-Coast US colocation facility, racking, cabling, installing, and configuring the new servers.
As They Say in Real-Estate: Colocation, Colocation, Colocation
The new hardware is located at New York Internet in Bridgewater, New Jersey, who generously provides colocation services to the FreeBSD Project. They have an amazing staff, and whether we are on-site or working with them through their ticket system, are always friendly, knowledgeable, and of course, helpful.
New Hardware Specs
In total, 14 new SuperMicro-based machines were purchased from iXsystems, for this site. They are all 1U servers, each with four 1TB drives, redundant power supplies, and gigabit ethernet.
Ten of the machines are single-socket Intel(R) Xeon(R) E3-1230 v3 CPUs, running at 3.30GHz (4-core with hyper-threading, providing 8 logical CPU threads), with 32 GB RAM.
Four of the machines are dual-socket Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2630 v3 CPUs, running at 2.40GHz (8-core with hyper-threading, providing 16 logical CPU threads per socket, 32 threads total), with 64 GB RAM.
For the Inner Geek in All of Us
No blog post about new hardware would be complete without pictures, right?
This is the front view of the ten single-socket machines:
And this is the back view of the same machines:
(Yes, I really do label each end of the network and serial console cables.)
Then, this is the front view of the four dual-socket machines (sorry for the blurry picture, though):
And the back view of the dual-socket machines:
Last but not Least...
On behalf of the FreeBSD Foundation and the FreeBSD Cluster Administration Team, I would like to thank New York Internet for generously providing the colocation space for our east-coast site, the NYI network operations team for all of their assistance during my visit, and especially all of the community investors that have generously donated to the FreeBSD Foundation. All of your support is greatly appreciated.
Thank you for helping make FreeBSD better!