March 24, 2007: More Packing

The packing continues unabated today. I slept in a little more than I did yesterday but didn’t manage to catch up on the missing sleep.

There is nothing exciting to report for today. We packed. Dad and Min focused mostly on the packing and I focused on getting the applications that have been running out of the downstairs datacenter switched to Scranton. That was no small project. That took many hours. And it is a scary process as well.

At six this evening I began the major migration process and it took only two and a half hours for us to move the big live application from one location to the other. It was stressful but it went really well and about as smoothly as could have been hoped for.

It was a weird feeling shutting down the old servers tonight. It was around ten o’clock this evening that the two Compaq Proliant 800’s were powered down for decommissioning. Those two sibling servers have been sitting side-by-side chugging away with no more than forty-eight hours of downtime for just over seven years. They were purchased in February, 2000 in Rochester were moved to Ithaca a few weeks later, move to Pittsburgh in late March and were a primary staple in Andy and my totally bare apartment. Andy used to sleep with his head right by one of the servers. Then in late April they were relocated to Rochester again when they went into production from our then Rochester Data Center. A year or two later they moved to Washington, DC where they put in a lot of time. They continued to run from there along with the IBM Netfinity server that we added alongside them. That was probably late 2001. Then in 2003 those three servers along with others that had been added over the years moved from Washington to Geneseo where they sat until today.

For seven years I have been able to think about those two Proliants sitting there humming away. After seven years we didn’t have to replace a single memory stick, CPU, power supply or hard drive. Each server had four hard drives – each having spun around approximately 26.5 billion times! And not one hardware failure. No hardware maintenance has even had to have been performed on either machine. The Windows NT 4 operating system that they have been running on was the same image that was originally installed on those boxes in the spring of 2000! Practically nothing ever went wrong with those boxes. They were the best investment ever. It was sad and lonely feeling to power them down without knowing if they will ever be powered on again. They are like old friends that have hung around through thick and thin always ready to power a database and serve an application.

Altogether I was able to shut down three servers tonight.  That took a lot of the “hum” out of the townhouse.  It is amazing how loud those things can be.  The silence was strange.  The one remaining server doesn’t leave until tomorrow but is pretty quiet on its own.

We were so exhausted from yesterday and today and Min and I decided that we needed to get to bed very early.  We were asleep by not much later than ten!

Leave a comment