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

False.

[Kwirl]

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

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

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:!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: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: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.

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.