On a side note, you’re holding your camera in a not so good way, you’ll get better control if you support the lens from the bottom while you hold the camera, otherwise you’re putting all the stress on your right hand

One of the coolest things to see is going in with all the lights out, and see all the pretty link lights going off, but I guess it would lose all the effect on camera.

Ron

Typically the inert gas they use is Halon (last time i talked to the fire safety systems guy anyway) and from what i understand, it is heavier than oxygen and displaces it, thus extinguishing.
I was surprised that they weren’t using fiber on their servers(as far as I could tell), but locally i guess it wouldn’t add that much lag as long as the pipes to the net are large enough and the loads are well balanced.

Thanks again for the peek!

And seeing Woopra was awesome!

This particular area where we took Cali and Neal was all fairly homogenous. No cages or cabinets because it’s a “non-client” area. All of the servers are owned and managed by Layered Tech.

There are however other areas in the DCs that have colo space with more security between rows and racks so that clients only gain access to their specific equipment. However, LT does very little pure co-lo, so not much of that.

As far as the Woopra servers are concerned, they are extremely efficient. Fewer than 20 physical machines currently track all of the stats and they have a lot of spare capacity.

Russ,

Woopra didn’t go down because of this video. ;-) But it did go down because of traffic in general.

Our Web server has reached it’s useful capacity. We’ve basically moved it up to larger and larger boxes until there is no single box big enough to handle it any more. At this point we’re engineering a load balanced solution which will distribute the traffic among multiple machines. Once that is in place we should basically never experience outages, much less the kinds of rolling unavailability that has been occurring lately.

Sorry about the issues, but it’s part of the growing pains. :-) Hence the reason it’s still in beta.

However, I’ll let you guys in on a little secret that we are expecting to release some major updates within the next week or two. So be on the lookout for a new Release Candidate of the client that will blow your mind!

Cheers,

John

That is so cool to see the inner workings. I am amazed that they let you in! =-)

Your videos are SO good!
David Foster

The biggest kick was always taking a customer on a tour and seeing the look on their faces when they first see it, especially if you switch the lights off and wander up the aisles with all the lights flickering (especially if the servers are all identical so it all matches).
When you throw the numbers at them for power consumption and go through all the redundant systems they realise why paying for proper hosting is preferable to running their business off their DSL line…

Looks like pretty standard colo these days, no sealed aisle or high density (25kw+) racks?

The Woopra system looks pretty efficient as that’s a reltaively small numbwr of servers for a real-time system monitoring so many sites.

Well done to Woopra and Layered Tech!