We did an initial version of vnode final testing software - this basicly boots the newly built hw node to see if it's alright. It's really rather simple, and last step on testing.
Also we further developed our testing procedures for new HW nodes to ensure when we rack a stack, each and single node is ready for production.
On the remote reboot relay boards a bit of progress has been made, and we'll be prototyping more the next week to maybe finally bring that online for a set of 16 hw nodes.
We also did some cooling upgrades on our room, nothing fancy, basicly utilizing the readily available cool and clean air available to us. Basic air circulation to lower the cost of cooling. It was a big success, and the AC is now turned on far far less. We will be continuing to upgrade the air circulation in near future with some extra high capacity fans, targeting full room air circulated every 2mins or less.
Some stacks had vnodes migrated to other stack, so we can take the stacks down for much needed repairs. Most of the repairs are just NIC replacements, bad models or broken, but a few have CPU or BIOS issues preventing their use as a vnode. One such stack has already been taken back into production successfully.
New model of big storage units entered into production, with better utilization of SSD. This storage node has 60Tb of raw storage combined with 1Tb of SSD. So far performance figures have been good, we'll know more when it's more utilized, and will show the direction to take in further big storage units. In the meantime we are trying a larger size of the Solo type storage, doubling the quantity of disks, multiplying amount of RAM.
Next week 4 big shipments of hardware is expected to arrive, tens of motherboards, hundreds of gigs of ram, PSUs, tens of cases etc. it's going to be really busy couple weeks assembling, testing and racking all of that!
It's going to be an exciting month! So much more nodes will enter into production.
The past month was mostly wasted by some logistics issues, a multitude of components deemed unusable for us, some firmware failures etc. but all of that is now history, and we are hoping the Month of November is our first mass production month.
Domingo, Noviembre 3, 2013
