Still going through the accumulated tech-junk here at work and getting the e-cycler to come get it… Three full pallets of old computers and monitors are gone – roughly 5000 pounds so far…
For the next pickup I’m cleaning out the server room, which has a wide selection of antiques in it – some of which were still in use just a few years ago. The majority though are old Dell PowerEdge 1950-III 1U servers… Funny story with those…
See it was mid 2008 when I was doing some load and performance testing for the State of Colorado, specifically for the online voter registration database (SCORE). Long story short – I needed to build a cluster capable of hitting a statistically meaningful percentage of the load that SCORE would see on voting day, and that required a literal shitload of servers.
I talked the State into footing the bill for thirty-three $2000 PE 1950 servers, and my director of sales and marketing talked them into letting us keep the servers when the test was over…
Above is my office / server room in 2008, with the PE1950’s in the middle rack, with the two SuperMicro controllers I built to sequence everything.
The right rack holds the dozen HP NetServer LP 1000r servers that I started the company with (dual 1Ghz Pentium IIIs!) and under the monitor is the ACT! / Backup server you’ll see in minute. On the very far right is the Mitel phone switch I acquired for free from the local CompUSA when they went out of business…
And my old MacPro is in the bottom of the rack on the far left.
Over the intervening 17 years the company has mostly run on these “free” machines, only upgrading to things like r710s as services outgrew the 1950s. And in that time a few of the 1950’s have kicked the bucket, and today I’m down to 26 of the original 33. Five are still running right now: three are being used as either untangle or OPNSense routers, one is the backup AD server, and one is the old mothballed Sharepoint server… Nothing terribly important and all are backed up and easy to restore if the 2008 hardware finally gives up the ghost.
And here are 18 of the survivors in 2025 – the two stacks on the right…
They’ve all been stripped of their dual 750 watt PSUs, and some have had their fans, raid cards, and other parts pulled to use as spares for the five still running and the three I’m keeping as full replacements…
Sitting on top of the middle stack of 1950s is that ACT! / Backup server I mentioned in the 2008 photo.
While the internals of that machine were upgraded several times, ending with a 2011 Asus MB and a xeon of some sort, the case is something left over from my dot.com PFMTEK days. RSO and I built some of the first viable digital video recorders out of those cases for a contract with the Bellagio casino.
The last interesting server is three up from the bottom of the left-hand stack of Dell PE 2950s that I got for the cost of shipping from a guy I know at ServerCentral ages ago…
That odd machine is a Dell 2650, an early 2000’s 32-bit server that supports up to 12! gigs of ECC DDR (not DDR-II, III … V) and uses Ultra3 SCSI drives. This was acquired in 2004 as a proof of concept to move the company off of Novell and onto Windows Server 2003…
And this is all just the last 20-ish years… I’ve really been doing this for far too long. 🙂
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