Well, not a lot got done but at the same time it was not easy. My buddy Jesse and I are far from professional but seem to manage our own equipment down at the datacenter. Today we put in a new firewall and it went smoothly! That was a surprise.
Well, this post will be more about our equipment at the datacenter..so if you don’t care, probably not a good post for you. So today we swapped out a Sonicwall NSA2650 with a NSA4650. For some reason when our main backups went over to Back Blaze every Sunday, we would get a massive slow down on the firewall. It was cap out at 150Mb/s and the cores would be running at 90%. We never saw any real slow downs on any of the sites that we host but it was odd none the less. The system should be able to handle it. Well, that lead me down the road to eventually buying a NSA 4650 which is about 2-3x the size. Found a smoking deal on ebay for a brand new one (its an old model) with 3 years of service for $900. I couldnt pass it up. For reference, the security services alone for 3 years is about $7000 worth of services. So a brand new firewall, under full warranty and licensed for 3 years for $900 is awesome. Is this a professional datacenter firewall, no. Will it handle everything we can throw at it for now, yes.
So for fun our hardware setup is as follows:
(3) Dell Poweredge R640s with 256gb of ram
(3) Dell poweredge R730s with 256gb of ram
(1) Dell Poweredge R740 with 256gb of ram
(2) Microtik CRS 10gb sfp switches
(2) Cisco something switches
The R640s run XCPNG and we virtualize the 3 as a pool. We run about 10 servers across the pool and have all the power we could ever need. These old Poweredge servers are workhorses. I have a few extra laying around in case we need parts or something goes wrong. This is all “old” hardware being a few years old but we have old Poweredge servers that are 10 years old running like a champ still. I’m sure there is some great reason that large enterprise changes their servers every 4-5 years. You know, so much money that you have to spend it somewhere. We find these little older machines to be very solid and will last us well into the future. We have backups anyways. We are in a Cogent datacenter with 1gbs unmetered bandwidth. I think if you compared what we have compute wise and bandwidth wise, we would be paying AWS $15k a month. Do we utilize all of the hardware? Not even close. Do we have it in case we need it? Sure do.
I hadn’t really been out to the datacenter in months. It was fun to go out there. Its a lights out place but now it seems like there is someone there 9-5 M-F. Its kind of weird just walking in like you work there but its very nice to just go do whatever you need, whenever you need. So we are backing up to AWS S3 as well. We do database backups and code backups. I’d like to say we don’t need them but for the cheap cost each month, its worth the extra backup.
Well, again, we got the firewall setup and deployed today. Total downtime for our system was about 2 minutes. Not bad for a couple dude’s who just do this on the side.
