Discourse Outage, Thursday March 14th 2013
Jeff Atwood March 8, 2013We’re in the process of migrating to a new datacenter at he.net so that we can offer world class hosting to our three launch partners.
Discourse will be down for substantial parts of the day on Thursday, March 14th 2013 as we migrate to our new datacenter.
Here are a few pictures of the co-located server rack that will be the new home of Discourse.
This enormous hallway at Hurricane Electric inspired parts of the Matrix, apparently. The servers are through that door.
Rows and rows of servers.
This is our row.
And here’s the rack itself. Only a few things in there now, as we have to move the bulk of the servers from our existing host, lmi.net, on Thursday March 14th.
We’ll have more posts in the future about the hardware running Discourse, but the basic unit of work is the server I talked about in Building Servers for Fun and Prof… OK, Maybe Just for Fun. It’s very fast, and inexpensive, too!
So, expect at least 4 hours of outage on Thursday March 14th, 2013, and possibly as much as 8 as we migrate to our new datacenter. Apologies for any inconvenience – but we think this will be the last move for a good long while.
Edit: move complete! Here are some glamour shots of the new servers all cozy and racked at their new Hurricane Electric home:
If you’re curious about the hardware inside the rack, see The Discourse Servers for lots more details!
6 Comments
March 14, 2013 5:27 pm
author
Some info on what’s shown.
- Topmost server is Tiefighter 10/11, our router. It is two redundant servers in a single 1U with a shared power supply. Runs HAProxy, etc.
- Below that is Tiefighter 1, which is unusually beefy with 128GB RAM, large 8 drive RAID array, and an 8 core Sandy Bridge Xeon CPU. It is our utility, data warehouse, and VM server.
- Below that are the main workhorse servers, Tiefighter 2,3,4 and 5. All identical, super fast 4.0 Ghz Ivy Bridge quad core Xeons, 32 GB, dual Samsung 830 512 GB SSD drives.
- The small box on top is a router with OpenVPN firmware for secure VPN access to the private remote server KVM-over-IP management ports.
- Two 24 port gigabit ethernet switches, one is a hot spare in case anything goes wrong with the primary.
- Network cabling: red is VPN / KVM over IP, blue is private network, yellow is external internet connections. I need to get a green cable for the cross-switch connects.
- The bottom shelf is spare parts for the most likely bits to fail, power supplies and drives. We carry one spare drive for each type in the servers (four different types, unfortunately), and two spare power supplies. One fits Tie 1-5, the other fits Tie 10/11.
All servers have Linux mirrored SSDs as their boot drives.
March 14, 2013 5:33 pm
author
All the above idling at a mere 3 amps, by the way, as you can see in the small green LCD on the datacenter power strip on the left side of the above picture. :)
See
http://blog.discourse.org/2013/04/the-discourse-servers/
For LOTS more details!
March 14, 2013 9:14 pm
Labels? Might I suggest labeling servers front and back and both ends of each cable. It really costs very little, in time and money, and will save you heartache at a later stage.
March 15, 2013 5:06 am
++ for the (mostly) color coordinated zip ties.
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