GeorgeBeech

Nothing that would pass deep scrutiny. Just our experience running SSDs in almost every server at Stack. We've only had one mass failure of drives. That was when 5/8 Samsung drives died around the same time in our packet capture box. The remaining 3 are still alive, although we don't really use them.

We have only had two Intel drives die on us. I'm interested (well academically, not professionally) if they will die at the same time or keep dropping off one at a time.

We tend to retire the machines or the drives in them before they fail.

Not necessarily. We've been running Intel SSDs in productions at Stack Exchange for 4+ years, and just recently had our first 2.5" drive die.

That said, most of the drives in this article are consumer drives. The problem with consumer drives is that they don't have capacitors. And since your writes are cached by the drive before they go to the NAND, if you lose power all of your drives will be corrupted in the exact same way at the exact same time.

If you don't care about the data, go ahead and use them. If you do pay the extra for Enterprise drives. They really aren't _that_ much more expensive these days.

> How many ops employees would you need for a fleet of 500 servers in a datacenter? We managed it all with 4 people with AWS.

I'd say our goal is to keep growing and serving more content without _needing_ 500 servers in a data center. We are doing pretty well at that so far. We'll see what happens in the future.

They are nice, we honestly haven't had to do much with them after we got them setup since they are VM hosts.

The most annoying part was that the Force10 OS that the IOA's run is slightly annoying to work with when you are used to working on Cisco gear. I'd almost rather people stopped doing "it's close to Cicso" and did their own thing because the connotative dissonance is jarring when something is close but not quite what you expect.

It took about 20 minutes to notice and fix. The Twitter alerting system let us know really quick.

That's nothing: https://gigaom.com/2012/10/31/how-good-prep-and-a-bucket-bri...

We where hosted at that Peer 1 facility during Sandy. Also, if the water makes it up to the 16th floor it's time to give up anyway ... no one will care at that point :-D

I never claimed to be sane

We generally pick a hashtag on twitter and do it that way. We've also done Hangouts On Air for non-hardware in the past which have been pretty fun as well.

We take a lot of pride in how much we get out of each piece of hardware. You don't need to have 1000 servers to run a large site, just the mindset of performance first.

If you look at their site, it's all college rot gut, and well liquor level stuff. It's the brands that you go and get a giant 1 Gallon handle for 10$. Which makes sense given their business model.

This is the stuff you'll get at a corner bar when you say "I don't care." When they ask what kind of vodka you want.

The 2960 series has 8 and 24 port models, that are fully managed switchs - VLANs, management, anything that you can do in the IP Base IOS.

See the bottom of this page for models the 24 and 8 switches are what you are looking for. http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/switches/catalyst-2960...

Also, if you want a cheaper options the Dell Basic switches are fully managed and have just about any feature you could want.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/powerconnect-2800/fs

Unless I'm missing something that you are looking for.

That is exactly how I have my desk setup. Monitors Facing the wall. Me facing the door. The office feels a bit smaller, but I'd rather not have my back/side to the door.

>Where I come from, it is considered bad engineering to build a product that can only run on a single platform, can only run on one particular OS, and the product is at the mercy of future decisions by a 3rd party.

This seems like a bit of a waste of resources to try and run an internal bespoke application on every platform imaginable. Now, if you are developing a product that you are then going to sell to other people to run on their own hardware this make more sense.

There are some very big benefits to writing to a specific platform, especially in the performance space.

In the end of the day it is a trade off between trying to eliminate every 3rd party dependency (next to impossible) or picking a solution or company you think will be around for a long time, and forging strong relationships with them.

We regularly talk to people at Microsoft (and all of the people who create and build to tools we use), give them feedback, and get bugs fixed. There is very little that comes down the pipe from them that we are not away of ahead of time and in some cases have helped shape through early access programs.

> SE has zero choice now otherwise they'd have to re-write their entire product...

This is not true at all, we have choices if MS decided to blow everything up. Not great choices, but we have them. Choosing between two or three crap options does not mean that options do not exist.

-George (SE Sysadmin)

Email [email protected] they should be able to help you out.

(I'm an SE SysAdmin )

Eh? The law only talks about convictions not arrests. You need to qualify for a Business or Tourism visa to be able to use the VWP. (source: http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/general/inelig...)

Sounds like your friend got screwed by an over zealous bureaucrat.

Yep.

Here are the screenshots from out Velocity Presentation: http://imgur.com/a/dawwf