100: the number of servers at ungleich

Posted on 2022-02-14 by ungleich devops team

The day of celebration, 2022-02-14

Today is the day that we put server100 online in our data center. Server100. Who would have thought that when we started our journey with the Data Center Light around 2017?

Just on this Valentine's day, we have actually received 2 new servers to support the growing storage needs of our customers, so server100 is celebrating in the data center with server101.

Big data

You might remember this slogan from the 2017's, "Big data" or "what can you do if you have a lot of data". We see big data a bit differently. We don't ever analyse our customer data or sell it to third parties, because we know that for every of our customers privacy is an important.

No, at ungleich big data means "storing a lot of data". And that is what server100 and server101 are going to do: each of them will provide around 400 Terabyte of storage.

This is a bit of a special case in our infrastructure, as these servers are dedicated to specific customers. Usually, all of our storage is provided by our Ceph clusters, but in this case these machines are providing independent storage.

Kubernetes + IPv6 everywhere

They are however integrated into our kubernetes clusters so that the actual workload is scheduled via kubernetes to these specific hosts.

As usual, the servers are running in IPv6 only networks, but have access to the Internet via NAT64.

More about server100

So, what kind of server is this server100 anyway? It is a 24 bay, Supermicro X9QRi-F with 64 cores and 512GB RAM. It is connected to our network with 2x 10 Gbit/s network cards running LACP bonding. Not only in terms of computing it is big, it is with it's 1620W PSU also one of the "heaviest" servers in our data center (the average PSU is rated somewhere in the 1000W area).

Some more insights coming from the terminal:

[17:33] server100.place10:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo  | grep ^process | wc -l
64
[17:33] server100.place10:~# free -g
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            503           0         502           0           1         501
Swap:             0           0           0

Obviously, the uptime is not yet that high...

[17:46] server100.place10:~# uptime
 17:46:42 up  1:37,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

... neither are the measured temperatures:

root@2157f4626763:/# ipmitool sensor  | grep degrees
CPU1 Temp        | 27.000     | degrees C  | ok    | 0.000     | 0.000     | 0.000     | 97.000    | 100.000   | 102.000
CPU2 Temp        | 28.000     | degrees C  | ok    | 0.000     | 0.000     | 0.000     | 97.000    | 100.000   | 102.000
CPU3 Temp        | 28.000     | degrees C  | ok    | 0.000     | 0.000     | 0.000     | 97.000    | 100.000   | 102.000
CPU4 Temp        | 27.000     | degrees C  | ok    | 0.000     | 0.000     | 0.000     | 97.000    | 100.000   | 102.000
PCH Temp         | 43.000     | degrees C  | ok    | -11.000   | -8.000    | -5.000    | 90.000    | 95.000    | 100.000
System Temp      | 16.000     | degrees C  | ok    | -9.000    | -7.000    | -5.000    | 80.000    | 85.000    | 90.000
Rear Left Temp   | 17.000     | degrees C  | ok    | -9.000    | -7.000    | -5.000    | 80.000    | 85.000    | 90.000
Rear Right Temp  | 14.000     | degrees C  | ok    | -9.000    | -7.000    | -5.000    | 80.000    | 85.000    | 90.000
root@2157f4626763:/#

With the addition of server100 and server101 we are about to crack the 10 TiB RAM barrier. Prior to the deployment of these two, a total of 8 TiB had been deployed in the Data Center Light.

As you can see, we have a lot of fun with our latest servers. And this brings us to the important point: celebration.

Celebration

Over the years we learned many great stories and have done many great projects together with our customers and partners. Many of them have turned into friends and we know the spirit of each and every project that came to us.

In this sense we want to celebrate reaching that big number with you and will give a 100% discount on any hosting order of 100 CHF or more for the first month.

Checkout the details on the 100 servers - 100 percent discount page. And now, happy 100 everyone!

If you feel like celebrating, you can also join us on our open chat.