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Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

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Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#81

Post by chiph »

drewg123 wrote: post #79
chiph wrote: post #78

We were hosted at Exodus in the Herndon Virginia area around this same timeframe. The staff gave us a small tour and showed us a cage about the size of a double-wide trailer. Inside were two Sun Enterprise 10000 servers and a whole wall of drive arrays. Plus networking gear, tape drives, etc. Easily $7-8 million worth of stuff. They said it was from a search engine we probably had heard of. Our guess was it was Altav…

Hmmm.. I'm pretty sure AltaVista ran on DEC Alpha hardware, not Sun. And Google used self-built high-density racks of Intel hardware. Maybe it was Inktomi? I'm pretty sure they used Sun hardware.

I don't think we knew about Inktomi at the time, but it certainly was a possibility. Our other guess was Ask Jeeves, since we didn't think that Excite had the money for that kind of hardware. But who knows, maybe Exodus floated the bill for that too.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#82

Post by jgalt212 »

acveilleux wrote: post #37
sulam wrote: post #29

And right there is why Sun was such a hit in the 90s and crushed in the bust.

Everyone in SV in 1999 used Sun boxes. Racking Ultra-2 Pizza Boxes was being very Internet Professional and money was flowing freely enough to pay for them.

yes, and now computers are cheap and devs are expensive. The money has to flow somewhere.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#83

Post by nokahn »

chiph wrote: post #78

We were hosted at Exodus in the Herndon Virginia area around this same timeframe. The staff gave us a small tour and showed us a cage about the size of a double-wide trailer. Inside were two Sun Enterprise 10000 servers and a whole wall of drive arrays. Plus networking gear, tape drives, etc. Easily $7-8 million worth of stuff. They said it was from a search engine we probably had heard of. Our guess was it was Altav…

I think all colos say crap like that. During a tour at switch, they pointed to a large cage and said, "It's a search engine that you all have heard about but I cannot name."

A week later, in Atlanta at QTS metro, they said almost the exact same words.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#84

Post by grkvlt »

nokahn wrote: post #83
chiph wrote: post #78

We were hosted at Exodus in the Herndon Virginia area around this same timeframe. The staff gave us a small tour and showed us a cage about the size of a double-wide trailer. Inside were two Sun Enterprise 10000 servers and a whole wall of drive arrays. Plus networking gear, tape drives, etc. Easily $7-8 million worth of stuff. They said it was from a search engine we probably had heard of. Our guess was it was Altav…

I think all colos say crap like that. During a tour at switch, they pointed to a large cage and said, "It's a search engine that you all have heard about but I cannot name." A week later, in Atlanta at QTS metro, they said almost the exact same words.

If it really was a large search engine, then I imagine they would be hosted at multiple locations, so not surprising that they were mentioned at both places?

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#85

Post by rsync »

drewg123 wrote: post #79
chiph wrote: post #78

We were hosted at Exodus in the Herndon Virginia area around this same timeframe. The staff gave us a small tour and showed us a cage about the size of a double-wide trailer. Inside were two Sun Enterprise 10000 servers and a whole wall of drive arrays. Plus networking gear, tape drives, etc. Easily $7-8 million worth of stuff. They said it was from a search engine we probably had heard of. Our guess was it was Altav…

Hmmm.. I'm pretty sure AltaVista ran on DEC Alpha hardware, not Sun. And Google used self-built high-density racks of Intel hardware. Maybe it was Inktomi? I'm pretty sure they used Sun hardware.

"Hmmm.. I'm pretty sure AltaVista ran on DEC Alpha hardware, not Sun."

Yes, they did. Remember - the original URL for altavista was: altavista.digital.com.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#86

Post by matthew1471 »

biofox wrote: post #13
RamenJunkie_ wrote: post #4

And then years later you could download all of Geocities as a few hundred GB Torrent.

Which makes me wonder: what would it take to match the capabilities of this setup with modern hardware?

I offered free hosting on my site for a little while, the legal issues of what people would do with free storage started to be the biggest problem. We're in a different era now.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#87

Post by jsjohnst »

vidarh wrote: post #63
jsjohnst wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my smaller regional ISP we started off using USR courier and sportster modems with Cyclades cards before moving over to Livingston Port masters. I ended up selling the company before moving to all digital incoming lines (needed to support 56k modems).

Did exactly the same.... We had sporters hanging off the wall for a while (couldn't pack them tightly due to the crappy ventilation on the Sporters, but they were light, so clamping the cables to a suitable plate and fitting it to the wall worked great....) The local telco had problems supplying enough lines from the nearest exchange, so they ended up hanging a thick cable bundle in the trees for several hundred mete…

We got metal wire shelves and kept each shelf fairly close together (about 6-8 inches). We had 10 selves per rack and 18 modems per 3ft x 6ft shelf. 10 racks and related additional hardware (switches, terminals, routers, CSU/DSUs, etc) fit in about 600sq ft of office space with space to spare for technician workbenches. Could do much higher density these days of course, but it was the mid-90s and we thought we were doing good at the time.

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#88

Post by vidarh »

jsjohnst wrote: post #87
vidarh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did exactly the same.... We had sporters hanging off the wall for a while (couldn't pack them tightly due to the crappy ventilation on the Sporters, but they were light, so clamping the cables to a suitable plate and fitting it to the wall worked great....) The local telco had problems supplying enough lines from the nearest exchange, so they ended up hanging a thick cable bundle in the trees for several hundred mete…

We got metal wire shelves and kept each shelf fairly close together (about 6-8 inches). We had 10 selves per rack and 18 modems per 3ft x 6ft shelf. 10 racks and related additional hardware (switches, terminals, routers, CSU/DSUs, etc) fit in about 600sq ft of office space with space to spare for technician workbenches. Could do much higher density these days of course, but it was the mid-90s and we thought we were d…

We didn't quite get to the size where we needed that before we sold off the dial up business (for a pittance; we contributed to accidentally set off a price war in our market with incumbents with deep pockets - it was no fun, but I learned a lot)

Re: Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

#89

Post by jsjohnst »

vidarh wrote: post #88
jsjohnst wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We got metal wire shelves and kept each shelf fairly close together (about 6-8 inches). We had 10 selves per rack and 18 modems per 3ft x 6ft shelf. 10 racks and related additional hardware (switches, terminals, routers, CSU/DSUs, etc) fit in about 600sq ft of office space with space to spare for technician workbenches. Could do much higher density these days of course, but it was the mid-90s and we thought we were d…

We didn't quite get to the size where we needed that before we sold off the dial up business (for a pittance; we contributed to accidentally set off a price war in our market with incumbents with deep pockets - it was no fun, but I learned a lot)

I got lucky in that regard. The larger company in our area decided it was better to buy us out than compete on quality of service, so we were in a position to better negotiate terms of sale.
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