Behind the Scenes: The Hardware that Powers Basecamp, Campfire and Highrise

37signals.com

18 pointsthemcgruff5 comments

Not a huge fan of the blade chassis vs. individual servers. Cleaner cabling, but software/firmware problems can kill the whole chassis, and you're locked into a single vendor.

I rarely run out of RUs before I run out of power on anything. Maybe it would be different with ARM-based blades.

Real hardware, though, vs. cloud, pretty easy case to make for a stable load app.

(I'm the author of the post).

These aren't blades and I dislike blades for the hardware/vendor lockin reasons you mentioned. Blades usually share power, network, etc. These only share power + baseboard management controller. We can lose a single power supply and still keep on going. We've distributed the applications over multiple chasis, just in case though.

Ah, I haven't messed with these things yet. Do you like them?

The BMC is horrible. It needs a cold reset frequently, and it often doesn't work at all when access from a non Windows machine. Otherwise they work really well. I like that the sleds are able to be removed from the front too.

Are we really getting back to the "post everything from 37signals.com" track? Blargh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com