Ask Slashdot: What Would You Do With Half a Rack of Server Space? 208
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.
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.
Learn hadoop (Score:2, Interesting)
You have the makings of a mini-cluster there. Take the opportunity to learn to install/maintain/query hadoop.
One of the most common failover mistakes... (Score:4, Interesting)
Keep everything ready, so you can switch back when the cloud services fail and/or your management team changes.
Did you miss the part about them trying to cut opex? *siiiiiigh*
Even that aside...Maybe the latter, but not the former. One of the most common mistakes of failover environments is using the "old stuff" for failover/backup.
That works great, until you exceed the computing/storage capacity/bandwidth of the original hardware.
Let's say in a year traffic is up 30%. Something goes wrong, big time, with Teh Cloudz. You've done a good job of keeping the old hardware current and replicated. You 'flip the switch'...and the old environment promptly chokes...oops.