Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ask Slashdot: What Would You Do With Half a Rack of Server Space?

Posted by timothy on from the give-it-a-piece-of-my-mind dept.

New submitter Christian Gainsbrugh (3766717) writes I work at a company that is currently transitioning all our servers into the cloud. In the interim we have half a rack of server space in a great datacenter that will soon be sitting completely idle for the next few months until our lease runs out. Right now the space is occupied by around 8 HP g series servers, a watchguard xtm firewall, Cisco switch and some various other equipment. All in all there are probably around 20 or so physical XEON processors, and probably close to 10 tb of storage among all the machines. We have a dedicated 10 mbs connection that is burstable to 100mbs.

I'm curious what Slashdot readers would do if they were in a similar situation. Is there anything productive that could be done with these resources? Obviously something revenue generating is great, but even if there is something novel that could be done with these servers we would be interested in putting them to good use.

4 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Keep It Ready by binarylarry · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Keep everything ready, so you can switch back when the cloud services fail and/or your management team changes.

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    1. Re:Keep It Ready by multimediavt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Keep everything ready, so you can switch back when the cloud services fail and/or your management team changes.

      That was going to be my suggestion as well. I would not "get rid of it" or "donate it", Hell, I wouldn't let the lease expire either! I would keep that half-rack-o-stuff around for at least the next two years to see how well the "Cloud" does for you with the provider of choice. Plus, it never hurts to have a set of backup servers around that you control (that mirrors the data in the cloud, at least!). I have absolutely no faith in third-parties controlling my data and critical services. I might take advantage of some services but I would NEVER, EVER put my data under someone else's control ... did I say EVER? It's just a really bad idea and experience will teach you why. Good luck!

  2. of course by sercasti · · Score: 5, Funny

    porn, every flavor

  3. mbs/Mbs by starless · · Score: 5, Funny

    I doubt you can do much with a 10 milli-bit per second connection...

    (Sorry, but I'm a scientist, units are important to me...)