Our New Datacenter Cabinet
As Discourse grows, we're adding more server capacity and newer servers to make sure our hosting remains blazing fast.
We have one server cabinet at Hurricane Electric, which we have been very happy with, and we just upgraded our account to add another full 42U server cabinet and another gigabit internet connection.
Cables, as always, are color-coded:
█ IPMI VPN, █ private local intra-server network, █ switch cross connect, █ cabinet cross connect
Right now it's a partially populated cabinet, just our standard Cisco 2960X switch (and an inexpensive netgear switch dedicated to the private IPMI management connections), and seven of our new, faster, Skylake based 1U servers for internal testing. This also lets us exercise our cross-cabinet connection muscles, so if we need to add 3, 4 or even more cabinets to support our future customers, we'll be ready.
Colocation isn't our only plan. We've also been pushing for more of a hybrid cloud arrangement, where …
- Free trials can be deployed to the cloud for potential customers, and then migrated to our super fast hosted infrastructure when the trial converts.
- Enterprise customers who are uncomfortable with our single datacenter can have a backup cloud instance on hot standby that we can automatically switch to in the event that something happens to the he.net datacenter.
The first item is particularly exciting since it would let us scale up our free trials and offer Discourse to many more people at lower cost.
Here's to an even faster Discourse hosting plan in 2016! Stay tuned!