Welcome to the New Slashdot Chicago Cluster

Thanks to everyone who tested on Friday, as well as to all of SourceForge's netops crew, our corporate overlords at SourceForge for paying the bill, and of course all the engineers on Slashteam- Jamie McCarthy, Tim Vroom, Chris Nandor, Chris Brown, and Scott Collins, we are now running on the new iron in a cage in Chicago. We'll run a story in a few days about the ridiculously overpowered new hardware we have now, but now is the part of sprockets where we dance.

Comments

Touch my monkey!

[schon]

now is the part of sprockets where we dance. Touch my monkey!

Obvious question...

[JustinOpinion]

So... what is going to happen to the old hardware? Are you going to going to scrap them? Hand them over to sourceforge? Sell them to another company?

Or auction them off to your readership for charity?

Re:Obvious question...

[Precision]

Most of the old hardware is exactly that.. really old hardware.. some will be repurposed.. but most will be scrapped.

Re:Obvious question...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

What you need to do is switch the faceplates so it looks like the old hardware has the new faceplates, so you can stand to lose the "new" hardware without really losing anything of value.

Re:Obvious question...

[Provocateur]

So when will you break the news to The Robotic Overlord that he is NOT really new, but made of scrap parts, and we only had a new faceplate riveted in, and implanted 1 Gig's worth of fake memories, huh? Huh?

So that when he asks, Is this all true? You reply with a sardonic tone, Remember all those dupes?

SourceForge

[friedo]

So now that SourceForge has upgraded Slashdot's fancy-pants hardware, when are they actually going to make sourceforge.net not suck so much?

Just kidding. I love you guys.

But seriously, sourceforge.net sucks balls.

description of the process?

[SethJohnson]

Do you guys have a description of the migration steps hidden away in a journal somewhere?

Appreciatively,

Seth

I cannot reply

[I Like Pudding]

For I am but a head in a rusty metal box.

False.

[Kwirl]

In the computer world, there is no such thing as 'ridiculously overpowered'.

Can your servers run Crysis on max settings? :P lol

Paying the bills

[LinuxInDallas]

Speaking of paying the bills, I have always wondered what it costs to maintain a website like Slashdot. Does anyone know what the cost of webhosting a site this large might be?

Re:Paying the bills

[Slashdot Suxxors]

100 Gold a month.

Re:Paying the bills

[azuretek]

Having worked for many large websites that have a boat load of visitors every day I think I can give a little insight. (As well as having worked for many web hosting datacenters)

More than likely they have a good deal on bandwdith, assume they use 500Mbps a month, a traceroute from seattle shows they're using at least savvis as one provider. We can safely say they're probably paying no more than $18.00USD per month per Mbps. These are prices a small time carrier might get, they may be paying more and who knows how many other providers they're paying for or if they just buy a blend from their colo center.

Lets put that price at: $9000/month so far

Then you factor in the floor usage, normally you can get a full rack for about 2000 with 40a. I'm willing to bet they use at least 60a per rack, add in another 500. Plus they say they have a cage, they charge extra per square foot, a guess would put the cage at an extra 1000 per month.

So I'd say about 3 racks with a cage would cost around: $8500/month

So far the total is about $17,500.

Now if they staffed their own people and didn't have any outside monitoring or anything of that nature that might be the total cost. In reality they probably have a contract with their provider for one site maintenance, 24/7 on site support, hardware replacement and the likes.

At my current place of employ we pay 30,000/mo a month for that kind of service, I think we're a bit above what one would normally pay but we have a pretty high up time SLA.

Add another 10,000 a month for maintenance/support/supply contracts.

Grand total I'd say is about $27,000/month USD. It might be higher or lower depending on their deal with their providers but normally for a standard colo deal it's around that price.

I've seen sites pay out well above that (100,000+) for colocation and have an awesome return.

Public safety comes first, I guess

[Mostly a lurker]

... we are now running on the new iron in a cage in Chicago.

While geeks have often struck me as a little weird, I have not previously seen them treated as actively dangerous. I hope they let you out soon.

Re:Search?

[Farmer Tim]

Well, the search feature isn't working.

So everything's back to normal.

Unimaginative, tawdry, pale and ineffectual praise

[Lacrocivious Acropho]

Congratulations on your new cage! That sounds odd when said. I don't contribute much, apart from exposing /. to those who might benefit but haven't yet found it. I will take this opportunity to say "Thank you!" for more than a decade of the single most entertaining, informative, rewarding, gee-whiz stuff I have gotten from any site, ever. You guys do a splendid job, and I hope you will continue that effort, and that culture, forever.

Re:Unimaginative, tawdry, pale and ineffectual pra

[plover]

Seconded! This has been my favorite link to the tech world (I don't get out much) and for all its warts, it's a great place to hang out.

However, my employer would love to find your new cluster and beat it with a tire iron.

Re:!news

[The Clockwork Troll]

This is absolutely news.

Finally, Slashdot has the highly redundant replicated infrastructure worthy of their highly redundant, replicated article topics.

Re:Unimaginative, tawdry, pale and ineffectual pra

[Solder Fumes]

Your employer is Tanya Harding?

Re:Finally!

[JWSmythe]

    Chicago is the center of the universe? :)

    Actually, my work is considering where to move it's servers. It involves a HUGE amount of fact finding. Chicago is one of the places they want stuff, but that's for customer reasons, not for "center of the universe" reasons. Our locations are chosen based on current customer usage, and statistical information I gathered at previous jobs. When you have 8 million users/day from around the world, those demographics stick in your head real well. :)

    In my research, I found the best places to be are.

    New York City. 111 8th ave, 60 Hudson, or 25 Broadway. The selection would be based on provider interconnects and availability. Some providers service all three locations with their own private interconnects, so it really doesn't matter.

    Los Angeles. One Wilshire, or one of a few select locations nearby, again with private interconnects to One Wilshire.

    Miami. Near or at 1 NE First St.

    Chicago. Near or at 427 S La Salle St

    The runners up are:

    Chicago
    San Jose
    Amsterdam
    Frankfurt
    London
    Paris
    Tokyo/Osaka

    In time, I'd like to have equipment in all of those locations. Or we can go the Akamai route, and put stuff anywhere there's a rack. :) I swear, they're everywhere I've had an opportunity to wander the colo space.

    For just about any provider of English based contact, the rankings of customer location by major geographic area are:

    North East United States
    South East United States
    Europe
    Western United States

    Obviously that would be skewed for the content. For example, a Japanese speaking site, with local interest content would be best placed near JPNAP in Tokyo or Osaka. Likewise, a Russian site with say daily weather reports of Siberia would probably want to be in Chelyabinsk, Russia, and you probably want to use Rostelecom.

    I noticed that Slashdot is now using Savvis. They were offering an amazingly cheap deal on bandwidth recently. I wasn't actively pursuing the bandwidth side, I was looking for the physical location side where my providers of choice would be. I'd be willing to bet they're in the Telegraph building. I'm curious now to who's suite they're in. :)

Re:No more \.ing?

[dotancohen]

So, no more \.ing \.? No. Now we will hear about the update process on thedailywtf.

Re:!news

[tepples]

You owe me a new keyboard. And a coke. Can't help you with the keyboard, but here's the coke.

Re:!news

[ari_j]

Screw that. Tag it touchmymonkey. Do it, you know you want to!

Re:What was wrong with California

[Precision]

Mostly... all the data centers in California are at or close to power / space constraints.. that's one of the driving reasons for moving outside Cali.

Aside from that.. moving away from fault lines definitely helps

Chicago Cluster?

[houghi]

So now even the dead accounts can mod. Neat.

IPv6 please

[ptudor]

Greetings Germanic Dancers,

Could you please add an IPv6 VIP to slashdot now that you've got this move out of the way? I mean, it's 2008 already :)

Have you ran any stats on your dns logs to see what percentage are requests for quad-As?

If you're nervous about suddenly blackholing because of misconfigured remote sites, perhaps you could add an ipv6beta.slashdot.org site à la ipv6.google.com? Or, I read of a long-running test a website had been running where a third of clients were served a one-pixel image from a hostname with a single AAAA record, another third a dual record, and finally a single A record to test against reachability problems.

So, I'm sure you're all smart and working on it and I'll just have to keep patiently waiting, but I'll be so pleased when your v6 integration matches undeadly.org.

Re:IPv6 please

[Precision]

That's the problem, once we can get a native v6 feed from Savvis we'll have v6 versions of the sites. The idea of running these sites via 6to4 makes me cringe.

Re:Central is good.

[JustOK]

Its not the lag that causes problems, its the rotating the bits so that they're the right side up that causes the delay.